Honesty Leads to the Best Travel Writing
Pressured by travel editors to write flowery prose about a destination so that publications can secure those necessary advertising dollars, most travel writing is a bore. Even worse are travel writers who pen stories in return for a free press trip. Their writing is often indistinguishable from a publicist’s press release. Take it from a travel expert. Rarely have I ever encountered a perfect trip, where the travel, accommodations, and destinations are all stellar during the same jaunt. There is always some adventure you’re thrust into willingly or not, some bizarre local you meet that helps define the place, and a slew of mishaps. Place those anecdotes into the article and you have a great read, not unlike the writings of Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux. Rarely do I see a scathing review of a destination, so when I came across this little gem from a writer at the Sydney Morning Herald, I was thrilled. I was researching a trip to northern Sumatra for a client who wants to see the orangutans at Gunung Leuser National Park. Unfortunately, they have to fly in and out of Medan, the third largest city in Indonesia and the focus of this story.
All week, I’ll be sharing with you some of my least favorite misadventures in print. Enjoy.
As a young travel writer, working as a Contributing Editor at Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel Magazine, I would regularly meet Arthur Frommer in his office in midtown Manhattan. I would come prepared, ready to pitch my 3 to 4 story angles on a sheet of paper and the legendary writer, who made his name penning "Europe on 5 Dollars A Day" in 1957, would politely listen and shoot down every one of my ideas. He then would come up with his own suggestions: "Steve, why don’t you do a story on the Caribbean islands that are rarely affected by hurricanes, like the ABC islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao?" One of those story ideas I would return to again and again in my travel writing career and, in fact, became the cornerstone of our beliefs when we opened our travel agency, 
Most folks associate John Muir with his boundless efforts to make Yosemite a national park and as the father of the Sierra Club. Yet, the great naturalist is just as celebrated in his homeland of Scotland. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Muir’s death in 1914 and as part of the 
In the world of exhibitions, there are juxtapositions of talent and space that just work brilliantly. Take Chihuly’s twisting and curving glass, now a mainstay at botanical gardens across the country. Putting contemporary fashion into five medieval cloisters is another gem of an idea. The Cloisters, at the tip of northern Manhattan, is now the uptown branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Take the A-train to 190th Street, grab an elevator up, and you’ll soon be walking through Fort Tryon Park high above the Hudson to the monastery-like buildings that John Rockefeller donated to the city in the 1920s. Living in the city for close to a decade, I only made it up here once to see the celebrated Unicorn Tapestries and Medieval manuscripts in the towering buildings. Now there are crowds coming to see Alexander McQueen, Valentino, Balenciaga and more than 50 other designers presenting their interpretations of a Catholic theme in the show titled 
After hiking on Mount Desert Island’s Quiet Side, biking 
As editor and publisher of the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick worked with some of the finest writers of his time, including Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost. Yet, it’s his marriages to not one, but two accomplished gardeners and horticulturists that has had far more of a lasting impression. In 1916, Sedgwick moved with his first wife, Mabel, to a 114-acre hillside property in the North Shore. He built a Federal-style brick house and even had the verandah shipped from a former hotel in Charleston. The house sits atop a drumlin staring out at forest, but it’s the incredible gardens at