What's Hot in Travel in 2016 (Entirely According to Me)

If it's the start of a new year, it's time for an onslaught of "What's Hot" lists. And let's face it, the justifications for the inclusions in these lists can sometimes seem a little... tenuous.

So my friend and colleague Pam Mandel has taken the bull by the horns by publishing a blog post entitled The Only 2016 Hot List You’ll Need is This One. It's a list of items "based only on the fact that I LIKE THEM" (says Pam).

I like this "anything goes" line of thinking. So here's my Hot List for Travel in 2016. All items included because, well, I like them.

1. Warsaw is the New Berlin. I can't say this enough. Mainly because I thought it up when I was in the Polish capital last year, and it sounds like the sort of catchy phrase that should mean something. So I keep repeating it and waiting for it to catch on.

Seriously though, I could see Warsaw taking on the arty-hipster-hub role as Berlin becomes more expensive and old hat.

There are many factors in its favour.

Warsaw is still cheap by standards further west; the city has a weird gritty mix of Renaissance-neoclassical-socialist-21st century architecture all jammed together in a lively fusion; and there's a whole ex-industrial district on the east bank of the Vistula ideal for artists' studios.

It's already happening to some extent; read my article about the Neon Museum at Soho Factory as one example: The Beautiful Bright (Neon) Lights of Warsaw.

2. Rail Travel is the New Cruising. I've always liked travelling by train, but it's only in the last year that I've stepped up the pace of writing about it.

In March I boarded the Eastern and Oriental Express for a lavish journey aboard beautifully decorated carriages from Bangkok to Singapore (read Express Yourself).

In May and June I travelled all over Poland by rail for my latest Lonely Planet guidebook gig (see How to Travel Around Poland by Train).

And in October I travelled from Los Angeles north to Seattle via Amtrak, a trip that will be recounted soon in the magazine Get Up and Go.

Given the regular outbreaks of norovirus aboard big cruise liners, I predict I will continue to choose long-distance rail over cruises.

Some of the rail journeys I fancy doing include Budapest to Istanbul; the line up to frosty Churchill in Canada; a sleeper to the north of Scotland; and more long-distance trips across the USA.

3. Aussie Cafes in Foreign Cities. There's definitely a slow invasion going on out there, as Australian-run and Australian-style cafes pop up in the big cities of the world.

Over the past few years I've written about Aussie cafes in London; Aussie cafes in New York; Aussie-inspired cafes in Singapore; and an Aussie cafe in Los Angeles.

I can confidently predict it'll still be hot to seek out Australian cafes wherever I go.

4. Taking Soap from Hotel Rooms. I have a confession to make - I compulsively take home those little soaps they provide in the bathrooms of five-star hotel rooms.

I don't know why, exactly. If they're really good soaps and I'm only there for a couple of nights, I'll shuttle one cake between sink and shower, so I can slip the other immediately into my toiletries case.

I end up with so many of them, for a year afterward I have fond reminders of my travels whenever I take a shower at home. I particularly like the soaps from Fairmont hotels; they have the ideal balance of fragrance and texture, in my considered opinion.

5. Not Being A Digital Nomad. Some people fetishise the idea of constantly travelling, living out of a suitcase and working online as you move from country to country, never settling in one place.

That concept fills me with horror. I love travelling, but I love being home as well. Melbourne is a great place to live, and I think you need a home base in order to fully appreciate the contrasts offered by being elsewhere.

6. Not Doing Extreme Sports. If it's your thing, fine, but I derive most travel enjoyment by hanging about cities, checking out local neighbourhoods and trying to avoid the sort of tourists who want to go bungee jumping.

7. Not Taking Travel Lists Seriously. Pam said this already: "Any list that takes itself too seriously, show it the way back to 2015." Amen.

Sovereign Hill: New Gold Mountain Remixed

Lola Montez and I have a history. In 1855 she scandalised Victoria’s polite society by performing her saucy spider dance across the colony.

Then in 2005, I wrote an article for The Age (which was dismissive of Montez the first time round) to commemorate the 150th anniversary of her all-conquering tour.

And finally, we met in passing today on the streets of Sovereign Hill, though the former mistress of the King of Bavaria was more concerned with trading blows with newspaper editor Henry Seekamp, who’d dared to imply that the dancer possessed uncertain morals.

It was, of course, a historical reenactment with a slight edit - Montez and Seekamp did test out horsewhips on each other in real life, but in the confines of the United States Hotel. I, coincidentally, am writing this at the long timber bar of the rebuilt United States Hotel, on the main street of this replica town, which recreates the lively and chaotic gold rush era of 1850s Ballarat.

Gold rush town

Got all that? Good. So while the folk band in the corner strikes up another tune and the barmaid pours another ale, let me give you my thoughts on the place.

The first time I came here, I’d expected a cheesy antipodean Disneyland, a kind of “Gold Rush World” complete with corporate branding and actors dressed in giant fibreglass heads resembling those of bearded, gap-toothed Victorian-era gold miners.

The reality was, to my surprise, quite different. There’s something about Sovereign Hill that’s both charming and very relaxing. It’s partly because it really does resemble a small country town - the inhabitants may be in fancy dress, but there are enough streets lined with dusty timber buildings and ragged miners’ tents that it has the right “feel”.

On top of that, it’s full of businesses selling items typical of the era - clothing, toiletries, candles, sweets - many of which are made here. As you wander away from the busy main street, there are more items of interest scattered through the side streets - market gardens, animals, a wheelwright’s factory - which you can often wander through on your lonesome.

Panning for gold

There are also activities to undertake, such as panning for gold at the diggings area below the main street. Here, crouching visitors agitate wide metal pans vigorously in the hope of retrieving a few flecks of gold. There is certainly gold present, by the way, as the management has thoughtfully salted the stream with a modest amount beforehand.

Watching the gold panners is theatre in itself; I sat and observed a tour group from China getting down and dirty at the stream, having a thoroughly good time sloshing the pans in the hope of scoring a speck of the fabled metal.

There were several Chinese tour groups here today, living proof of the reported big increase in Chinese arrivals at Melbourne Airport. And I noticed something I’d never seen before at Sovereign Hill - their Mandarin-speaking guides were themselves dressed in Chinese garb of the 19th century, featuring silk shirts and broad straw hats.

Chinese connection

And then the penny dropped - Sovereign Hill isn’t just another Australian peculiarity on the itineraries of Chinese tourists, like kangaroos and penguin watching. There’s a strong Chinese story here on the goldfields, via the thousands of Chinese miners who came to “New Gold Mountain”, as they named the Victorian goldfields, to try their luck on the diggings.

With that in mind, I had a look through Sovereign Hill's Chinese Camp, a recreation of the Chinese miners’ homes and lives in 1850s Victoria. To my surprise, the small temple contains an impressive audiovisual presentation, via suspended widescreen TVs placed strategically within (haven’t flatscreen TVs been a godsend to museum curators everywhere?).

The story of the Chinese miners is an intriguing element of the multi-ethnic Victoria of those days. It’s not a story, frankly, that reflects well on the European population, who did much to make the Chinese feel unwelcome; but seeing the crowds of newly prosperous Chinese tourists now visiting Sovereign Hill and panning for gold, there’s a sense that amends have been made.

Disclosure time... on this trip I travelled courtesy of V/Line's daily Goldrush Special train and Sovereign Hill. But I paid for all the sippin’ whisky myself (and soon hope to have my sight back). For accommodation, see my 2007 review of Sovereign Hill Lodge.

Also check out the Sovereign Hill post and Eureka Centre post of my friend and blogger Walter Lim, who accompanied us on this trip.

The Plugged-in Traveller

This week I attended the Future of Journalism conference here in Melbourne.

It was an interesting event, with a series of panels exploring the murky future of journalism - murky, given the huge changes technology is forcing on the profession.

One of the speakers was Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet Publications, who talked about the future from a travel publishing perspective.

He commented that though the past - with its focus on guidebooks - was more predictable, the future offered lots of interesting possibilities for LP to sell its mountain of travel info via electronic means.

Which made me reflect on how I use electronic devices when I travel. Obviously I have a digital camera with me, and increasingly, a mobile phone with a local prepaid SIM card.

I couldn't do without my Palm PDA for several reasons: it carries useful notes and my diary, along with music and a number of novels for me to read without overloading the packing.

And, of course, I have my ultraportable Sony VAIO laptop computer with me. On my LP assignment in Poland this year, I was able to access free wireless Internet access at just about every hotel I stayed at, along with various public places.

As a result, I used it frequently - to keep in touch with friends and clients, to back up work, and to research the journey ahead (the Polish national train company PKP, for example, has its entire timetable online).

The next step seems obvious - having the relevant guidebook on a portable device, either a phone or PDA. Some years ago, LP had a pioneering version of this called CitySync, and I used both their Rome and Sydney guides on my Palm of the time. It was damn useful, particularly because it was searchable; I remember standing in a Roman square and searching for a list of nearby restaurants within a certain price range.

The other option would be in downloading specific info on demand, rather than storing an entire guidebook on the device. So that restaurant list could be compiled by a remote LP server and pulled down to your phone, for example.

This is all very interesting. I found the CitySync guides very usable, with the extra benefit of making me look less like a tourist clutching a printed guidebook. I'd be happy to download a modern version of that when I next travelled. LP's current Pick and Mix option of book chapters contained within a PDF file is a step in the right direction, but I'd prefer my data to be interactive.

No doubt it will come, especially now that smartphones like the iPhone are finally gaining larger screens. Would you like your guidebook to be an e-guide? Or do you prefer the classic dead tree version?

An Essential Luxury

According to eTurboNews this week, Indonesia’s tourism minister Jero Wacik has an unconventional opinion on the ongoing global economic crisis.

He thinks it will benefit his country’s tourism industry rather than harm it, saying “The crisis is stressing so many people out. They need to relax to relieve the stress.”

Is this a supreme example of spin doctoring, or the most optimistic statement since the commander of the Light Brigade said “We can take ’em”?

I say this not to impugn the forecasting skills of Mr Wacik – he may well be proven to be correct. But it’d be against the conventional wisdom, which suggests that in times of economic downturn, people give up travelling.

On the surface, this makes sense. If companies are feeling cautious with their money, they may well cancel all non-essential travel and use email and video conferencing more. Individuals might also see travel as a luxury they can do without, and hoard their pennies in the old oak chest.

And that’s what this theory revolves about, doesn’t it – the assumption that travel is a luxury, rather than an essential. Especially for individual travellers.

But is it? Obviously it comes down to the opinion of the individual. I’d argue that, at least in my life, travel is an essential item I’d give up a long way down the list from many material comforts.

On my Facebook page I say that I love the way travelling through somewhere totally unfamiliar, preferably using a foreign language, engages all your senses and makes you feel extraordinarily alive. I’m sure many others who’ve experienced the stimulating joy of travel agree.

On top of this, think how much good travel has done in dispelling racist stereotypes of foreigners among everyday people. Sure, narrow-minded people still travel overseas and return with unaltered prejudices, and even broad-minded travellers might meet only the sort of pushy touts that give their countries a bad name.

But never again will governments be able to get away with the propaganda posters used in the two world wars, depicting the enemy of the day as a race of slavering inhuman monsters with hideously distorted features who bayonet babies. The fear of the unmet “other” is always worse than the fear of a people you’ve actually encountered, however imperfectly.

Intolerance will, sadly, always be with us. But travel does its bit to dispel its evil, and long may it do so.

Let the Post-Games Slump Begin

According to a story in eTurboNews this week, a new report has revealed that hosting the Olympics is not a surefire way to increase your tourist inflow. Rather the opposite.

Counter-intuitively, it appears that holding the Games actually acts as a negative, depressing the number of tourist arrivals from up to two years before the event, to two years after. Apparently the effect has been observed for every Games back to Barcelona in 1992.

The theory is that regular travellers stay well away from the host city for the entire run-up and the event itself, assuming (perhaps rightly) that the city will be in construction chaos and overpriced. It seems, too, that the aversion effect lingers for some time before the tourist masses feel it's safe to go there again.

This news made me curious about the Olympics before 1992; did the tourist interruptus effect happen then as well? Did the Nazi tourism minister curse the economic drop-off at Berlin in 1936? Did the tour operators of Antwerp in 1932, or St Louis in 1904, complain about the lack of punters?

And what about even further back? For the answer, let's cross to our commentators in Olympia, Greece, circa AD 393...

Sofia: "... so that's one embarrassed Senator who'll be careful not to worship both Dionysus and Aphrodite at the same time in future! Over to you, Yianni."

Yianni: "Thanks Sofia. In local news, there's been a big reaction to the Emperor Theodosius' decision to abolish the Olympic Games as of this year. The Emperor's spokesmen are claiming the decision was made for religious reasons, but some are saying there was another agenda at work."

Sofia: "That's right, Yianni. Apparently a recent report commissioned by the Olympia agora discovered that the Games have an adverse impact on the local economy, driving up prices and keeping visitors away for the rest of the year. Unidentified senior Senators say that local donors to the Emperor's military campaign funds applied pressure at the top."

Yianni: "And they now feel the way is clear for the development of Olympia as a tourist destination with a broader appeal. Outspoken businessman Dimitri Stathopoulos has, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, announced the development of a major theme park, Olympus World, which will feature rides and other amusements based on the mythology of the now-banished pantheon of gods. Detractors have pointed to his majority ownership of accommodation in the area, and his prominent role on the local council."

Sofia: "Mmmm. When we caught up with Mr Stathoploulos today, he had this to say: 'It's time for Olympia to catch up with the rest of the known world, and I'll bet my bottom denarius the place will be a thriving success long after the Olympics are forgotten. May God lay Olympia low with an earthquake if it isn't so.'"

Yianni: "Well, time will tell, Sofia. In other news, the annual fashion show in Mediolanum opened last night, and the fashionistas are saying that this year, barbarian chic is in..."

Back to the 21st century studio...