We headed into 2020 with great hopes and dreams, only to see our travel plans dashed as we all went into isolation and a worldwide pandemic spread across the planet. We kept on publishing in Perceptive Travel though, so I’ve gathered all the posts about the top narrative travel stories we continued to produced, all gathered here in one place now as a historic retrospective.
When I launched Perceptive Travel way back in January of 2006, we started off strong: in that first issue were Peter Moore, Rolf Potts, Jen Leo, Howard Stephens, and Bruce Northam. I appeared on podcasts recently hosted by two of those people and have had some great adventures with one of them since, probably connecting in person again in a couple weeks.
I was hoping this online magazine concept launched on a shoestring budget would survive long enough to make it to the next decade. Many online magazines that got millions in venture capital funding didn’t, but we kept plugging away and we’re still here, putting out the best travel stories on the internet each month.
Publishing travel narratives is not really a smart thing to do from an objective standpoint. Google, especially these days, rewards listicles, big brand stories, forum posts from five years ago, and fluff. As you’ve probably noticed, they also fill most of their first page now with ads and links to products or companies they are making money from. Their objective is no longer to give you the best information or (especially) to give you something inspiring or interesting to read. Plus after they killed off the most popular RSS reader, people stopped following specific sites except on social media, which then started suppressing results from publishers.
Thankfully, Perceptive Travel is but one site that I run and there are enough travelers who want to read quality content that it has managed to at least break even on an annual basis. In some ways it’s like a public service project. I feel that somebody has to keep long-form narrative travel writing alive somewhere besides in books, so I guess it’s going to be me.
Thanks to everyone who has tuned in now and then and thanks even more to the e-mail subscribers who hear from us each month when a new issue is out. On to the new travel stories!
One of the most prolific and talented travel writers I know is Rory MacLean, who just put out his 14th book. As someone who was writing about the fall of the Berlin Wall when it happened and has traveled regularly in the region since, he’s got the kind of perspective on Eastern Europe that’s hard to find elsewhere. We’ve got an excerpt from his new book that has one of the greatest titles ever: Pravda Ha Ha. See Hungarian Lies: Budapest and the Manipulation of History.
That photo at the top is from Beebe Bahrami, who has written several stories about long walking routes in Europe. Trekking in Cornwall, England, on Saint Michael’s Way reveals a pilgrimage through prehistory, presence, enchantment, and legend, including rock-throwing giants. See Bowling With Giants on St. Michael’s Way.
Madelaine Triebe is a guidebook writer who has spent years traveling around South America and is usually frantically researching opening times, bus schedules, and restaurant menus. She takes a big step back from that with five days of horseback riding off the grid in the Andes Mountains with some very basic places to lay a sleeping bag, guided by gauchos of few words. See A Horseback Trek in the Andes with the Argentine Men of the Mountains.
What happens when you come face to face with your possible future self in one of the wildest places on earth? Our middle-aged author Laura Resau finds out when her jungle tour traveling companion in Ecuador turns out to be another HSP (highly sensitive person) who is decades older and three times as annoying. See Finding My Ghost of the Future in the Amazon Jungle.
Just as we have since 2006, we review travel books each month because, well, not many publications (besides a few like Outside and the New York Times) seem to bother anymore. As an author I love Amazon and Goodreads, but most normal people who post on there write just a few sentences and don’t have a history of reading hundreds of travel books like our two reviewers have. This month Bill Caverlee does the honors and there are three great books to check out here.
As we moved into February of 2020, we still had no idea what a storm was on the horizon.
Julia Hubbel headed off to Ethiopia, home of the Danikil Depression. This fiery plateau below sea level is sometimes referred to as the gate to hell and you may have to go through hell– and most of what’s in your wallet — to get there. See her story on how a simple land of farmers is wrestling with rapidly growing tourism numbers here: Horses, Hooves, and Heat in Today’s Evolving Ethiopia.
I experienced some uncharacteristically cold weather travel, after years of hardly ever wearing a coat. I went all-in with a trip to a taste of France in North America in winter, on skis, on foot, and in an ice hotel. See the whole story here: Celebrating a Quebec City Winter Visit by Going All the Way.
Is an ideal winter travel getaway for you a trip to the beach? Well we’ve got one of those this month too, but from someone helping out a turtle preservation program on a beach jammed with tourists on the Greek island of Crete. See Tracking the Elusive Loggerhead Turtle in Touristy Crete.
Then we had a story of how Palermo has evolved from a land of mob hits and car bombs to a place tourists actually visit on purpose. See Back to the Future in Palermo.
Hints of Trouble in March of 2020
As we moved into March, this pandemic that was limited to a few spots in China and Italy was starting to pop up in lots of other places and creating quarantine situations. But we kept on rolling with our travel stories.
One of the articles is from Mexico and it is an article on a tradition that baffles many of us who live there or visit the country before around Christmas: the Baby Jesus doll phenomenon. Why are each of them wearing what looks like a frilly dress, and why are there so many of these outfits for sale? Lydia Carey has the answers to this and more and attends the big mass for them in Candelaria: When 1,000 Dressed-up Dolls Come to Mexican Mass.
There’s also a bit of Mexico in Sherry Shahan’s article about the rich stories behind the paintings on the building walls in Austin, Texas. Amidst the hyper-growth and the pains that come with it, she zeroes in on a smaller part of the picture in Austin’s East Side: Art for the Masses.
Then we pop over to the great city of Lisbon in Portugal, where Beebe Bahrami check out the city of local hero writer Fernando Pessoa and a creative festival taking place in the city. See Disquiet in Lisbon.
Gillian Kendall returns with a story on traveling with a Coast Guard crew as a lecturer on one of their ships. The formalities fade away and she needs to take a leap of faith when the crew takes a break to dive off and go swimming. See YOLO, FOMO, and Semper Paratus on Swim Call in the Caribbean.
Bill Caverlee reviews three new and notable travel books: Feel the Wild, Ten Years a Nomad (which we talked about with the author here), and Divine Encounters: Sacred Rituals and Ceremonies in Asia.
Stuck at Home Mode Arrives
As everything went into lockdown and phrases like “essential services” and “social distancing” entered the daily vocabulary, we decided to hit pause on new stories and publish a few retrospective issues.
First up was a shout-out to all the travel industry workers who were suddenly unemployed. We put out this Salute to the Guides issue with stories celebrating them.
Then in May, as things still weren’t improving, we did an issue called, You Weren’t Going to Go There Anyway, with stories about obscure places and strange destinations.
Traveling During Covid Times
After we started to figure out what the threat was and how it worked, some souls ventured out again, driving or getting into a half-empty plane, for a change of scenery. So we launched an issue called, “Travel Stories for Now and the Future.”
Dave Seminara visited Meteora in Greece a decade and a half ago as a young diplomat and met a monk who made a big impact on him. Back now with the family, would he still be able to find the magic despite what felt like 100 times more tourists? See A Pilgrimage to Meteora.
One story of mine was something you could act immediately. It’s a road trip kind of place anyway: Montana. This is a state full of gorgeous road trip drives and ghost towns, places where hopeful men showed up in droves digging for gold. Those kinds of towns don’t tend to last very long. Once the ore is tapped out, the people move on.
This is a story about the towns that survived and even thrived, however, as comeback kids. See Mining the Past in Southwest Montana.
We also have a timely story of traveling during the onslaught of the pandemic in the USA. Norm Bour and his wife were told to shelter at home, but these nomads who were just back to visit family in the USA asked, “What home?” They caught a flight to the Caribbean side of Mexico instead, on what turned out to be the best flight of their lives. See their story here: Beating a Hasty Retreat from the USA in a Private 737 Airliner.
Stephen M. Bland has taken us to some strange places on the fringes of the old Soviet Union, but this time he dives into an area that’s still part of Russia despite some bloody fighting over the years: the North Caucasus Republics. See Tensions Beneath the Bling in Chechnya and Ingushetia.
Susan Griffith checks out three new and noteworthy books on data maps, vanished places, and the Zen of bike touring.
In July, we kept bringing armchair travel stories to those who were still rightfully afraid of mixing it up with others in public. You could live through the experiences of our explorers.
Julia Hubbel stays at an unusual safari camp in Kenya, one that saves the animals by bringing in travelers, but goes beyond that by running a ranch and supporting local farmers so they can be more successful. It’s a program that really works by supporting wildlife and the neighboring humans. See the full Ol Pejeta story here.
We welcome author Jodie Bond for the first time. She’s a traveler who plied the waters of Northern Europe on a ship with 26 sails and a 100-foot main mast, the passengers joining the crew on duty in rotating shifts when they leave their bunks. See Sailing From Fredrikstad to Amsterdam.
Photos and stories going back to Debi Goodwin’s childhood linger with her for decades as she dreams of seeing the mysterious statues of remote Easter Island. The journey to Rapa Nui comes together just before the world shuts down.
Claudia Flisi pitched this last story to me right before Italy went into lockdown in March — not exactly great timing. Since that country managed to flatten the curve though, we knew they would recover and be popular again in due time. So it was time to put out this one from the home of Parmesan cheese: A Phone Call From a Statue in Parma, Italy.
William Caverlee does the travel book review honors this month, checking out a Camino de Santiago guide from one of our contributors, Instagram in book form, and yet another “best of” round-up from Lonely Planet. See all three here.
In the August issue we traveled to four continents, with stories from adventures taken before we all got stuck in place.
Contributor Marco Ferrarese traveled to Peru to work on a guidebook and meet up with an old friend to go hiking. He talked his friend, his wife, and a traveler met along the way to take a parallel trek to the Lares Route through the Andes. As so often happens, it sounded easier when they got the directions the first time. See “How to Lose Friends and Mortify People While Hiking in Peru.”
James Dorsey is back as well with a tale from Africa, that time when all it took to get to a village in Ethiopia was crossing a crocodile-infested river in just a dugout canoe. See Crossing the Omo in Ethiopia.
We welcome author John Wright with a story from earlier this year when we could still move about. On a grand driving tour of Croatia from end to end, a couple unwittingly gets their last look at paradise for a while. See “Motovun, Croatia: Visions of Elusive Paradise Before the Pandemic.”
Patti Lefkos also made her debut in this month’s issue. She brings us tales of Tibet through the eyes of a local who has seen and endured so much of the Chinese occupation. See Calling the Earth to Witness the Truth in Tibet.
Last, we have a new round of three travel book reviews. Susan Griffith checks out a quirky exploration of contemporary Britain through the lens of past writers, a collection of road trips to make you drool, and a slight little book of travel quotations destined for the bathroom shelf. See them all here.
In September I got a little personal before getting into the other narrative travel stories.
I’ve lived in cities most of my adult life and felt comfortable in them. Most of the time I’ve spent in rural areas has been on outdoor adventures like multi-day hiking trips. Except that time last summer when I spent three days experiencing life on a ranch in Uruguay…
That’s one of the few places I’ve been in the past few years that probably hasn’t changed a bit. There are many people I’ve met in my travels over the years that I’ve thought about since the pandemic changed everything. In some cases, I’ve chuckled imagining those I stayed with that had no internet access and were miles away from any town. Since they only saw other people once every week or two anyway, their routine is probably just the same. Unlike those of us who live our lives intertwined with many others in urban environments, they just keep doing what they were doing.
I imagine that’s true for the couple I stayed with last summer in Uruguay, on a 1,800-acre ranch in what felt like the middle of nowhere. We didn’t see anyone that didn’t own or work on the farm while we were there, so they’re probably forging on the same way as always.
I haven’t written about that farm stay until now. It was part of a tour I was on through three countries in South America and the more photogenic parts of the trip were Iguazu Falls and Rio de Janeiro. I let the Uruguay estancia part of it simmer for a while until it appeared in this month’s edition of Perceptive Travel.
You can read the whole narrative here: Trying Isolated Farm Life on a Uruguay Estancia.
It’s a tale of how my life came full circle for a bit. I grew up in rural Virginia, where I lived in the mountains but saw miles of farmland anytime we went anywhere. When my track team would do distance training near my high school, the smell of manure spread as fertilizer was a common one in the spring, unfortunately. I high-tailed it out of there when I could and eventually ended up living in cities like Nashville, New York, Istanbul, and Seoul. I did ride a horse fairly often though in my travels, so at least I could get on and off the saddle without any help.
If you’re the type that prefers video, here’s a short overview I did of our time on the ranch there.
This is one country that turned out nothing like I had imagined. I’d looked forward to visiting Uruguay for a while because it’s one of the most progressive countries in the Americas, one that legalized marijuana and gay marriage before anyone else. It’s a chilled-out, non-judgmental kind of country with a great environmental record and a government that generally has its act together fiscally as well. (Quite a contrast to neighboring Argentina.)
I need to get back there someday though because I only got a rainy day in Colonia and fields full of cows and sheep. Every time I looked out the bus window I saw…fields full of cows and sheep.
James Dorsey is feeling the pain many of us are experiencing while being a lifelong adventurer stuck at home. While staying safe and looking out for others though, he’s got his mementos from around the world to remind him of people he has met and more interesting times. See For Now, Travels in My Mind.
Heidi Siefkas decides that the best antidote for cabin fever in her own house is to get out into the wilderness with a canoe and a tent for a few days on rivers and lakes. See Paddling Home in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota.
Debi Goodwin took several trips to Death Valley over the years, exploring it with her late husband. Will the wilderness park still retain its magic when she goes back now, solo? See Return to Death Valley.
Unlike a lot of travel publications that bit the dust or quietly faded away in 2020, as we got into the fourth quarter we were still rolling along and traffic hadn’t dipped much during this challenging time for travel. So I guess we were doing something right.
I had other things in the queue in October though and was trying to finish up a book. So check out the October issue page to click on stories about hiking in Spain, trying to locate lost relatives in Ukraine, traveling Papua New Guinea by dugout canoes, and memories brought back by a visit to a Saigon hot dog stand.
In the November issue, Julia Hubbel is old enough to be called a “senior citizen” but she’s tougher than most of us are, going on wild adventures that test the human body’s resilience and endurance. Being fit for travel has helped her recover from her dumb luck and there’s a lesson in there about a strong body being a body that survives. See Being Fit for Adventures is Being Fit for Life.
This has certainly been the year of the road trip since it’s one adventure you can go on that doesn’t put you in much danger while you’re on the move. Being in your own metal and glass bubble has its advantages. Take a trip with Camille Cusumano, a friend, and a canine from Monterrey through the southern USA to the mid-Atlantic. See A Lucky Dog Road Trip from Mexico to Maryland.
We look back on a different kind of long trip with James Dorsey, a mighty river substituting for the open road. He journeys on the Mekong of Southeast Asia from southern Vietnam to Phnom Penh, seeing how people live their lives along its banks. See Water People of the Mekong.
Even in normal times, not many tourists have Iran at the top of their list. So Sivaji Das and his wife got plenty of puzzled looks at comments before they headed there on a long trip with their baby daughter. See what they found in Through Rocks and Roses: Traveling in Iran with an Infant.
Also, we have a new round of three travel book reviews. William Caverlee checks out The Street Photographer’s Manual, Tokyo Megacity, and a guide to the universe beyond our planet.
It’s about my first visit to Machu Picchu in 2005, back before the “wonders of the world” designations, before Instagram, before the rush of the crowds to come. We didn’t have the place completely to ourselves, but it felt that way in some spots as we wandered around.
By 2019, the place was so popular that the government had to institute strict crowd control measures, ticket limits, and rules that squashed independent exploration without a guide. Only 400 people a day could hike up Wayna Picchu, in two shifts. “Empty Machu Picchu” was a concept that was seemingly gone forever.
But then it shut down for months. Completely.
The citadel is open again though, with much smaller crowds. For a few rare souls willing to fly to Peru, it’s going to feel like going back in a time machine for a while. Capacity is restricted to 30% now at the citadel and the transportation methods to get there are capped at 50% capacity. So you should still check out this older article on how much it’s going to cost you and where to reserve tickets, then start making travel plans. (It’s the rainy season now though and February is the wettest, so plan accordingly.)
Here’s the Perceptive Travel feature story I wrote to go check out: Visiting Machu Picchu Without the Crowds.
A Reprieve from Overtourism
As we closed out the worst year for travel in decades, we published one last issue of narrative travel stories to cap it off. In this one, we mentioned that if you were willing to take precautions, this could be a historic time to visit normally packed attractions. One of the most frequently heard terms in the travel media in 2019 was overtourism. You were not hearing that word anymore in 2020.
The first story in the December issue of Perceptive Travel is about my first visit to Machu Picchu in 2005, back before the “wonders of the world” designations, before Instagram, before the rush of the crowds to come. We didn’t have the place completely to ourselves, but it felt that way in some spots as we wandered around.
By 2019, the place was so popular that the government had to institute strict crowd control measures, ticket limits, and rules that squashed independent exploration without a guide. Only 400 people a day could hike up Wayna Picchu, in two shifts. “Empty Machu Picchu” was a concept that was seemingly gone forever.
But then it shut down for months. Completely. When it opened back up, it was for a number of visitors not seen since before I was there in the ’00s.
See the full story here: Visiting Machu Picchu Without the Crowds.
What do we do when we can’t hop on a plane to another country whenever we want? Marco Ferrarese decides to explore the wild side of Penang where he lives, walking across the whole island in Malaysia.
Beebe Bahrami looks back on her first magical journey to Provence, where the great river road of the Rhone transforms travelers into pilgrims.
Stephen M. Bland travels to northern Azerbaijan, to the town of Quba. There he discovers holiness mixed with a history of bloodshed, bootleg goods, and ganja.
Susan Griffith reviews three new travel books. There’s a lost region of Europe stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, a painful account of making a new life on a Scottish island with only nature for company, and an inspiring selection of adventure ideas for children and their parents. See them all here.
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