I have become one of those people
I have become one of those people
Penn Yan, New York
Finger Lakes Region
USA
Thursday, July 5, 2007
3.12pm
I have become one of those people who lets his travel blog wither away when he returns to his home country.
Before I left I had time at work to look at people's travel blogs. I was always annoyed when someone just stopped making entries. What the heck happened to them? Now I have become one of those people.
Making blog entries is like exercising or eating healthily. No one really wants to hear excuses about why you didn't to it; you should just do it every day. So I won't go into a long introspective analysis about why they haven't been there.
Andy (hobotraveler.com) is great: he says just write whatever comes into your head. He is right, of course, and that is why he has thousands of web pages and thousands of readers.
To fill you in: I am working at a winery helping with production and retail sales. I am in a beautiful area of the world, the Finger Lakes of New York State. It is not a very well-known travel destination. However, it is becoming better known.
I have that contradictory feeling I had in other places I have visited. The place is beautiful and I feel lucky to see it. However, as the area inevitably changes to accommodate more visitors, some negative effects are occurring. This is the contradiction that is cloaked in the words "development" and "globalization".
I grew up here, but I have been away for a long time. So I am both a foreigner and a local. My ties here are more permanent than the tourist, especially if I decide to live and work here. But I see the place through a foreigner's eyes at times.
Every day I have memories of specific moments of my travels. I might remember having breakfast at the hotel near Khao San Road in Bangkok or the hotel in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India or the guesthouse in Kaza, Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India.
If you wonder if I am aware of how much more I can do with my website: I am. I imagine I am as aware as anyone. I have hundreds of digital photos to put online; different ways of organizing the information that I learned about places I visited; personal reflections on my travels; stories to tell; and maps to make.
I have gotten kind emails from readers. One suggested I put my finances up. He is absolutely right. This would help a lot of people. It is the kind of information I was looking for before I left. Another reader encouraged me to write a book. Receiving these emails is very gratifying.
My idea with this website has been that this website is about "places" rather than "travel". Wherever I happen to be should be subject matter for the site. So I have wanted to write about places in the U.S. as well as abroad. Like a geographer, I should write about the unique things about a place that a person who has never been there would find interesting, and that a person who has lived there all of his or her life never noticed.
While traveling, even though I wasn't "working", I still had internal conflicts over whether I should be "seeing things" or "working on the website". If I had let it, the website could have taken all of my time and I wouldn't have actually done anything.
Now, I am letting my life become even more complicated by working, and working without a set schedule. I also let myself become conflicted about what I should write about, since I am living in a place that is very familiar to me.
These are actually perennial problems with writing, and, just as exercising or eating right, I should "just do it".
I have become one of those people
