What I’ve Been Up To

It’s been a while since I paid the world of wordpress.com any attention, with good reason, but it’s still a shame. All my efforts have been going into my other site over at TravelUnmasked.com, so I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs!

I originally made the move over to wordpress.org to take advantage of the bigger range of customisations you can make to a site, adding lots of functions (by way of simple plugins) that wordpress.com hadn’t got round to making available. However, in the last few months, the pests at wordpress.com (love you really!) have been on a mission and belted out a tonne of improvements! They’ve released almost everything that I went to wordpress.org looking for, like better galleries, sliders, social media links, and not forgetting they have released bucket loads of new free themes. They have also been busy providing wordpress.org users with more features that were previously only available on wordpress.com, by way of their Jetpack module, which is some consolation.

Buttons and spoilers and tabs, oh my!

Fact is, I’ve spent more time since ~February 2012 dealing with hosting, plugins, installations, conflicts, updates, and configurations than anything else I’ve done online. Possibly even more than anything I have done offline too, including the 25,000+ photo’s and few hundred hours of video I’ve captured in 20+ countries! So my advice to anyone wondering which way to go with a blog… unless you have a burning desire to understand how to use File Transfer Protocol to edit lines of code and the permissions of your server’s .htaccess file because anyone trying to comment on your site is getting a 403 error (my most recent baffling hurdle), then maybe leave your site on WordPress.com or wherever until moving it warrants paying a professional to manage it for you. Adding further weight to that arguement, I’ve even had to pay for lots of costs using wordpress.org for the pleasure of the ordeal!

They say content is king. It is. Focus on that.

The winter season for me is going to be all about taking my own advice for a change. I got back to the UK in mid-October and I’m staying put now until I’m ready to move on again. Why? To create lots of quality content. Almost a year of travel and photography has left me with the burning desire to justify calling myself a blogger by putting stuff out there. It’s also part of treating blogging as a business, i.e. getting paid for it. The business of blogging, which I’m not going to go into properly now (I have a war-and-peace draft post on it that needs scrapping and starting again), has some simple requirements. You exchange what you have, for what somebody else has. The blogger aims to have an audience mainly, be it social media channels or site traffic, and usually both. The other party might have accomodation, food, expenses, products, or… the holy grail… real actually-goes-into-the-bank-account cash!

So the art of blogging is finding your audience. And the business of blogging is making money with it.

And yet, I’m still not convinced that blogging is the business for me. It requires a grenade in the starfish to get me highly motivated enough to put all my energy into something. So while I plan to continue blogging for my own pleasure, for documenting my journies, and because one day I’d like to get paid to photograph and write, I’m not sure it’s the business I want to run for the next 10 years. However, it does have other benefits too – like being mobile, and being a great platform for opening other doors with. And that’s what I’m in it for really, because it might help to start the real world business that I do choose.

Post on Branding – imminent.

Lightning bolts.

I’d say I get struck by a genuinely great idea with the potential for turning into a successful business 3 or 4 times a year. I have at least a new idea for everyday of the year on average, but only occasionally do I know it is something more than just a spark of creativity. That’s part of the reason I’m being so damn fussy in choosing a business to start. The other reason is fear of the great unknown, and knowing how much work it takes to make any new business successful. My main fear is that the business I pick might not be ‘the one’. I know, it sounds like a girlfriend, but honestly, you can expect to spend more time with a new business than you can expect to see your other half, therefore it’s just as important!! So I haven’t picked an idea yet because when I do choose, it necessarily excludes me from going ahead with any of the other ideas for a long while…

Fresh Mussels in abundance on Porto’s beaches (not Oysters…)

Of course, the world is our Oyster.

Or does starting one business really stop me? You don’t have to start a business alone. Businesses with more than one founder have a better chance of success, and more hands make lighter work, so you get more done. It’s also more fun doing things with other people, and invaluable to have someone to bounce ideas off. I’ve had my eye out for a potential business co-founder for some time, but I get the feeling that kind of partnership is more naturally fostered when you stay put in places longer than I do. But if you’ve ever fancied starting your own business and are stuck for an idea, and you’re up for getting in at the ground floor with me – drop me a line, seriously. What’s the worst that could happen by starting a conversation? And if finding a managing partner for one idea works well, maybe working on more than one business at a time is feasible too.

I’ve read plenty of business books in my time, from academic study to those ‘here’s how I did it’ success biographies, and one that generated a lot of hype is The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris. His serial entrepreneurship is certainly inspiring, but he does what I tend to refer to as ‘bastardising’ everything. He finds the simplest, quickest, most successful way to sell something, staples it all together, and then steps back to watch it magically hold together. Tim knows every trick going, from marketing and SEO, to using drop-shippers and virtual assistants.

In that respect I tend to think of him like the great Henry T. Ford of the age of digital entrepreneurship. But much like Ford, who pioneered assembly lines and compartmentalising tasks, his processes completely disempower the workforce. The ruthless efficiency of his constructs leave him with a healthy profit from taking advantage of business hacks and cheap labour. It’s fair game, but not the kind of business startup I aspire to. I want to start something where the employees are the heart and soul of the business, enthusiastic about their work and enjoying a share of the profits, so that sheer human momentum will carry the business forward.

Ok, call me an idealist, I’ll let you know how I go. And is The 4-Hour Work Week worth reading? Absolutely, it’s a goldmine of practical solutions for anyone starting up.

Can I Subscribe You To Travel Unmasked?

Ciao! Sicilian Espresso Coming Soon

So to come full-circle on this post, all that’s left is for me to entice you over to TravelUnmasked and make a small request to people on the ShockAndOrr mailing list. Would you mind terribly if I popped your email address into the subscribe box at the new site? Reason being I’ve decided to put everything I’m writing over there for now, despite the URL initially being intended for travel content only. At some joyous stage in the new year I will be combining ShockAndOrr with TravelUnmasked, just don’t ask me how or what it will be called. When I was writing on S&O, I felt like posts just about travel didn’t fit. And now writing about social media, or the technology of photography, or politics, doesn’t quite fit on TU either. Clearly, they need to be one site, as SAO was supposed to be from the beginning. But regardless, you can expect the same content I promised here at ShockAndOrr.

You don’t need to do anything yet, as I’ve already decided I will be putting your email in the new site anyway. All that means is you will get an email asking you to confirm the subscription, and I’ll be putting an explanatory message together for said email, with a useful link to bring you… back here, in case you missed it.     If you aren’t interested, just ignore the email and say no more. It won’t be the end of the world (ha!).

But Wait!

If you do subscribe to posts from me at TU, you’ll get lovely content like this straight to your inbox;
(You can easily unsubscribe at any time)

• Heading to Scotland for Hogmanay, Haggis, and Highland Hijinks
• No Photos Allowed! Rise Of The Pointless Objector
• Unsung Heroes – The Artwork Of Antony Vassulo
• 3000th Tweet: Twitter Do’s and Don’ts
• The Quickest Travel Video Competition In The World Ever, Maybe
• Haunting Figures From Japan: Shinto Shrine Guardians

And other stuff too.

Well, that’s all for now folks.

Wishing you Happy Holidays for you, yours, and everybody else’s too. Now where did I leave my sprig of Holly…

Peter Parkorr

“It’s better to be fast and good, than slow and perfect”

Why didn’t someone tell me this when I was young? I spent my first 20 years of existence trying to get everything perfect. But this minute distillation of wisdom only perculated in my direction long after I’d grown. I see the logic and advantages of this approach now, obviously there are disadvantages too, but in many situations they are out-weighed. Too late for me though, I can’t change the habits of over two and a half decades, no doubt the derivatives of a slight tendency towards OCD, extreme perfectionism as it were, and a finely honed expertise in procrastination.

I’m not a defeatist – I am constantly trying to be faster, and happy with good – but the quality/quantity arguement rears its damn head. Photography is different, in that I’m always aiming for quality, but I like to click lots.

3am Fishing Trip, Białystok, Poland

This week brought a form of light balm to my pains; Two bloggers that I read regularly, by complete coincidence, both spoke about ‘pulling posts’ and then later re-publishing them. Admittedly they are both skilful writers and photographers, and fast with it, so maybe they have more artistic concerns, but can I smell my same dilemma in the air?

I wrote a travel piece a while back, chose the photo’s, changed it a few times, and then put off actually publishing for so long that when I remembered I had already written it, I couldn’t place which site I’d been working on. I will be publishing it… soon.

TravelUnmasked.com, where you can find… not much, to date.

Travel gets in the way too. Much as cleaning your room is a great distraction for exam revision, travel is a great distraction for – everything.

A typical day from the road;
Wake Up.
Remember how many things I’d like to get done,
Decide to eat first,
Don’t rush, too many new variables to go fast,
Chat to a new acquaintance (traveller, hostel staff, host, shopkeeper),
Brain begins to wander, taken off-track by a simple conversation,
Begin to do something productive,
Stop too soon, to see something local and take photo’s – ‘well I’m not here long and it’s still early’
Sometimes mooch slowly, other times rush maniacally, lose 2 hours or more,
Return to base and settle down to do more work,
Get a little done, but streams of interruptions are more prevalent later in the day (again, various people),
Time to eat again, maybe go out with others, maybe sit with my host, or extended family,
Sit and chat and enjoy the aftermath of good food, respectfully not rushing away as soon as I’m done,
Intend to go back to work again, to get at least one thing finished,
Just book an onward ticket or next accomodation firstly,
Invitations to relax or go out accepted, to talk with interesting people and enjoy the ambience (‘i’m not here long’),
Resolve to not stay out late, start early and do lots tomorrow,
Have the best times! Sometimes relaxed, sometimes energetic.
Go to bed trying to remember what to do first tomorrow,
Wake Up.

The days with actual travel involved? Forget about it.

I’m not complaining, just postulating. Anyway, I’m planning a stationary period back in the UK after the next month, and looking forward to it despite my long list of complaints about the place. I’ve ended up ‘travelling’ and the plan was more to temporarily relocate for a few months at a time. It takes a few weeks to settle in and create a workable routine, and to clear a path through new distractions so you can at least glimpse the possibility of productivity across the room. 8 countries in the last two months was not the intention. It goes against my own beliefs that if you skip through places, you don’t have the really worthwhile experiences. It’s just big fat tourism, a dirty word.

Obviously I love it to bits, the new places, the new people – my camera sees a lot of action. But I’m not too young, as I said. I’m weighed on by my own need to achieve something worthwhile, I can’t bring myself to throw my future to the wind and be free in the moment.

The plan is to be running a business first, and living a ‘wanderful’ existence second. That’s what my About page says, sort of. As much as travel blogging can be a business, its a slow process of receiving benefits in kind and then using them to elevate your profile, and continuing the momentum until you are large enough to warrant payment. It also doesn’t require being on the road much, and you would be more successful mastering the basics of internet marketing than endlessly accumulating new material.

Here’s the two bloggers and blog posts mentioned, I always enjoy their stuff;

Actually, neither of them have the same problem as me at all, but it was still refreshing to know I’m not the only person that gets caught up with indecision. I just frustrate myself. Most of my favourite writers were prolific in their art (Isaac Asimov, or David Foster-Wallace) but if I try to emulate their results, I get gloop. So, baby steps, and distractions in abundance.

Horrible, riveting distractions. 

PP

Well he actually did earlier this year (Ba-bum-tish!), when a 27 year old Londoner had a heart attack in Hyde Park, and the Rain Man himself just happened to be first on the scene. For the same 3 or 4 details repeated and rephrased with as much originality as tulips in Amsterdam, you could see the Guardian, the Telegraph or CNN‘s articles.

Ok, so why regurgitate this old ‘news’? Well, it’s because the whole of the world’s media completely missed the biggest sitter* of an opportunity to make a pun, ever.

Firstly, I really don’t think this was news. Its just utter clap-trap. People have heart-attacks all the time and if they are fortunate, somebody nearby will call an ambulance, and hopefully they will survive. Well done Dustin and everything, your acting is lovely blah blah, but anybody who found the chap would have done the same, right?

Collectable Clap-Trap (Good)

Anyway, the media will insist on reporting a much higher percentage of clap-trap rather than news that is really important (famines, wars, corrupt politicians – oh wait, they’re all the same thing) because Joe Bloggs switches the channel when it gets too depressing. And so the mainstay of todays media outlets has become the dear old pun. I’m not going to collect examples, if you haven’t noticed them it’s because every bit of news you read is so pun-laden (no relation) that maybe we are becoming pun-dead!

More undead jokes than you can swing a cricket bat at

But if YOUR BUSINESS is to find these lame excuses for stories and make them puntastically exciting, to keep readers engaged and encourage sharing of your content, and all that other CLAP-TRAP – shouldn’t you at least put some effort into it?

We live in a world peppered with slogans, and appended with taglines – yet I haven’t been able to find a single online publication that spotted this glaring opportunity to write a headline. Surely they were referring to IMDB for his film resume? Was it too far down the list? Or maybe the film itself wasn’t popular enough. I don’t believe for a minute that the coffee-boys who were given the task of writing this ‘story’ know Mr Hoffmans films well enough not to fact-check somewhere along the line.

Anyway, here it is, for your amusement, a film titled Accidental Hero, starring Dustin Hoffman. The headlines just write themselves!

Hey coffee-boy, copy paste that tag-line would ya?

Maybe American’s can be forgiven (for this, not anything else) as it may have been released as just ‘Hero’ in the US – but the story broke from London. Has everyone working in celebrity filmy entertainmenty news got fluff for brains? Probably. It could well be one of the required competencies.

Speaking of fluff for brains. Un-frikkin-beliebable.

Today, the very same Hyde Park in London has hundreds of athletes from all over the world competing in the womens Olympic triathlon.

Good luck Team GB (all of you)! I do hope Dustin is nearby in case of any emergencies, maybe he could help with some electrolyte replenishment too.

A bien tot,
Peter Parkorr

*a sitter is an expression from British football which means a ball that should very easily be put in the back of the net, much like a sitting duck is a very easy target. Commonly referred to as an ‘absolute sitter’ (no mathematics implied) and also explained as clear as mud here.

I started this blog on 6th September 2011, much to my surprise, I thought it was mid-November.

So far I’ve posted 18 times (19 including this one) with no real routine – an average of 2 posts a month, but not even managing 2 posts in February, and this will be my first blog post of June too.

My Stats have slowly but steadily climbed, although June has not continued the trend. A lot of my views are directly related to how active I am on twitter, both finding good people (hopefully real people) to follow and how regularly I tweet.

Absolutely everything I can possibly plug-in to twitter, I have done, so for example if I Like a video on Vimeo or Youtube, it automatically tweets. Twitter and facebook also echo each other, but I may end that unhealthy relationship soon. I have grown my twitter following fairly enthusiastically, half the reason I never get round to posting here, with 2,793 current followers of @PeterParkorr and 899 current followers of @SenorSunset, my travel pseudonym. So far I have vetted each and every account I follow or follow back using Pluggio, so while that is quite slow and distracting, I’m fairly happy my numbers are mostly real people, not just spambots and accounts that exist by retweeting.

In February, I decided to start experimenting with WordPress.org and used a free hosting service to start TravelFree.li – The Who, How and Why of Long-Term Travel. I didn’t think of ShockAndOrr as a place that I could also call a travel blog, it’s more of a live experiment. So I branched out into WP.orgs ‘MultiSite’ which means I can host several sites from one installation/dashboard. The free hosting was poor so I wouldn’t recommend it, altho it was a good way to try out self-hosting before choosing a paid option. I spoke to a few travel friends and made them Featured Travellers on the site, altho not much has happened since then! Total posts over there to date: 1.  

This week I decided TravelFree.li (pronounced ‘travel freely’) might not be the right vessel for my personal travel tales either, and started another site at TravelUnmasked.com. If you do happen to head over there, it is in even more need of work than its predecessor, but at least people’s first remark won’t be ‘Travel-free-dot-l-i? Why Lichtenstein??’. It’s current (completed) posts to date is also 1.

Photography-wise, I’ve had a lot of practice. In December I left the UK with my family and spent christmas in Malta. The family left after a week, but I stayed on, getting around to different parts of the island, and spending 10 days on the island of Gozo, its smaller cousin. After that I took the boat to Sicily to do some WWOOFing (working on farms), and ended up staying for 4 months. In late-April I attended a travel blogging conference and my DSLR camera hit the 10,000 photo’s mark. My actual DSLR total is a lot closer to 15,000 photo’s taken (maybe over that) as I reset the counter a couple of times in the past to cure a problematic SD card. I’ve been reading a lot about photography, techniques, and equipment, and also learnt from professionals I’ve met on the road. My understanding has improved, my editing is more effective (with GIMP), and I think my eye for a good photo has developed too. Taking part in the weekly Photo Challenge might show this, but I haven’t been. Tut tut.

Last week I decided to go with Zenfolio as the place for my photography. I’ve used Flickr but wasn’t in love with it, Facebook reduces the quality so much that my shots look horrible, and Google+ would be my choice if I hadn’t been scared off by talk of them owning the image rights to whatever I upload. So my Zenfolio page means my photo’s are backed up and hosted, I can embed them in my posts, and I can also create nifty slideshows to embed in sites (like at the end of the Etna post on TravelUnmasked). You can create private galleries easily too, and even put a price on for people to order prints (for when I feel my shots are worth buying!).

This week, at the culmination of weeks of research, I bought new camera equipment, finally deciding on the Panasonic GH2 – the main benefit being top quality video capture. I also got a few decent lenses for it, not expensive ones, but I can already see the difference in quality from my old Sony kit lenses.

Outside of blogging, there has been a theme of death! Sad but true. September 2011 was not a great month in general, as I had no real plans for travel or otherwise, and then my grandmother, aged 89, passed away. It wasn’t entirely unexpected because of her age, but it was still an unhappy time. Cue big family gathering in Ireland. Only 3 weeks later, the elderly neighbour of my parents, almost like family, also passed away. We were all shocked to find out she was 98 years old, as she had refused to tell us her age ever since we’d known her, 19 years earlier! I returned to the UK in early May to arrange new tenants at my own house for the year, and a few days later my grandfather took his leave as well, aged 93. Another family gathering in Ireland was one positive point, but losing the last of the older generation from the family is strange to contemplate. Finally, in a dark and no doubt coincidental pattern, on getting to my place in Manchester I was sad to hear that the elderly grandfather from nextdoor, who I often chatted to and sometimes took advice about leaking drain pipes from, had also passed away.

Despite the morbid season, I remain perfectly upbeat about the rest of life! I made good friends in Catania working at a hostel for the latter 2 months in Sicily, and met lots of great people. I hung out with hordes of inspiring travel bloggers in Assisi, and had the chance to photograph stunning places.

I do need to concentrate on actually blogging more, and trying to be a travelling blogger just makes it all more complicated. The road is also the worst place to eat healthy and keep fit. Nevertheless, in the next day or two I’m off to mainland Europe, starting in either Belgium or Holland and then overland to Finland. I’ll have almost everything I need on my back, from tent and sleeping bag, to enough photography kit to make a donkey groan.

Looking back on the first 9 months (sort of) I’m not unhappy with my overall progress, but I’m aware of the need to prioritise the blogging more. It’s exciting to set off with my backpack again (its still going strong after 10 years!) and I cant wait to start shooting pictures, timelapse and video with my new setup.

Here’s to remembering those we’ve lost, and not forgetting to live our own lives. You can choose if you think I’m succeeding or failing so far, but either way, I’m quite happy marching on.  

Peter Parkorr

R.I.P. Gran, Poppa, Marian, and Jimmy, thanks for being there, and you will all be missed.

I have a theory. I’ve been realising lately that certain books and authors have had a much bigger effect on my life than I appreciate. I’m not sure I would have tried an iota of the things I’ve been doing in the last few years if it weren’t for their influence. So while Murakami has not influenced me to do any one thing I can put my finger on, he did help me fall in love with the Japanese, and his work is always an education. (Future posts in this series dedicated to individual Authors will be more literally cause-and-effect).

As Abi King of insidethetravellab.com pointed out in her talks at TBUMBR, words can be very powerful. They’re a one-to-one conversation between author and reader, where you can transport them into another time or place, and they’ve been known to start wars and revolutions.

I feel like Every book I read widens my perspective, adding another persons’ opinion to my thinking, allowing me to explore more of the world as they see (or write) it. In fact, over time, my thinking has been adjusted drastically by the powerful and educated voices I have been drawn to – in novels, newspapers, journals. And in the last few years I’ve found it harder and harder to talk to the people around me, about the things I really care about.

This is not me.

Why? Well, my theory is that we live in different worlds. You wouldn’t expect to have a lot in common with somebody from a different walk of life, and in effect, that’s what we are. The people in my ex day-to-day world have a different set of goals, worries, and motivations, to me. Every time I pick up a book that interests me, the divide between us increases, because we don’t share the same set of assumptions or (apologies) limitations. For a while we had our daily activities in common, but even those I had started rejecting a couple of years before quitting them altogether.

A lot of the people I am thinking of do read as well, but evidently we don’t read the same things. Maybe the phenomenons of auto-hypnosis, positive thinking, and self-confidence are at play. Two people can see the same thing and understand different truths, each biased by their own beliefs. Trivial case in point, my interpretation of a BBC ‘Politics’ advert versus the opinion of the thread author, who actually wrote to the BBC to complain. So, I think it is mainly what I’ve been reading that’s made the difference, but maybe how I’ve been reading it has contributed as well.

Reading Murakami for instance, is being thrown into a chaotic lesson in history, music, mythology, philosophy, human emotion, and Japanese culture. He leads me on delicately sculpted tours of his psyche, and impresses me with stunning vistas of learning. In contrast, the latest Patricia Cornwell or a bit of J.K. Rowling, are ‘pleasant’, or ‘entertaining’. If anyone mentions twilight, I will find out where you live.

Somebody I was recommending a book to once said “oh wait, is that fiction? I only read things that are real”, with a look of distaste. I see what you’re trying to do there – you’re implying that you are too cultured to bother with pointless fantasy stories, that should be either in the childrens section, or the bin. The fact that only the day before they had happily waffled on for an hour, about TV shows and films they saw at the cinema (including sci-fi), was lost on them. The power of metaphor my dear, the power of metaphor.

But in the last couple of years, after deciding to walk the walk – of talk I had previously only talked – it’s been amazing to meet people with opinions and ideas I can really relate to again. Now, everywhere I go, I find people engaged in similar journeys, with similar doubts about the follies of mankind, and people willing to debate ‘death and taxes‘.

Death doesn’t have to be boring. Nor does life for that matter.

I was originally introduced to Murakami in the small English-reading section of a Japanese book shop. I made a grab for ‘Kafka on the Shore’ purely because of my love for Franz Kafka’s novels. A read of the author bio and a synopsis or two, led to me buying ‘Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World’ (described as the most Kafka-esque). If I wasn’t travelling, I would have bought several of Murakami’s books there and then, but as the latter novel is considerably slimmer, it won out. (I do own a Kindle but have resisted using it, so far!)

Kafka Memorial Statue, Prague

So here I present a few text bites that I found aesthetic from the latest book I finished reading, ‘Kafka on the Shore’. I tried to keep these short without losing their meaning, but I could happily copy out whole chapters of the book that also kept me smiling or captive throughout. No spoilers included.

From Chapter 19;

        “I’ve experienced all kinds of discrimination,” Oshima says. “Only people who’ve been discriminated against can really know how much it hurts. Each person feels the pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T.S. Eliot calls ‘hollow men’. People who fill up that lack of imagination  with heartless bits of straw, not even aware of what they’re doing. Callous people who throw a lot of empty words at you, trying to force you to do what you don’t want to. Like that lovely pair we just met.” He sighs and twirls the long, slender pencil in his hand. “Gays, lesbians, straights, feminists, fascist pigs, communists, Hare Krishnas – none of these bother me. I don’t care what banner they raise. But what I can’t stand are hollow people. When I’m with them I can’t bear it, and end up saying things I shouldn’t. … Do you know why that’s a weak point of mine?”

       “‘Cause if you take every single person who lacks imagination seriously, there’s no end to it, ” I say.

From Chapter 24;

“You’re a really healthy person, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Nakata is. I can’t read, but I’ve never had a single cavity and don’t need glasses. I never have to go to the doctor, either. My shoulders never get stiff, and I take a good dump every morning.”
“Isn’t that something,” the maid said, impressed. “By the way, what’s on your schedule for today?”
“We’re headed West,” Nakata declared.
“West,” she mused. “That must mean you’re going towards Takamatsu.”
“I’m not so bright and don’t know geography.”
“Anyway, Gramps, why don’t we go over to Takamatsu?” Hoshino chimed in. “We can work out what’s next after we get there.”
“All right. Let’s go to Takamatsu, then. We’ll work out what’s next after we get there.”
“Sort of a unique style of travelling, I must say,” the maid commented.
“You got that right,” Hoshino said.       [So did I. PP]

From Chapter 32;
This one is just a phrase I liked the sound of – a bit like the famous phrase ‘cellar door‘. Yes, I got that from Donnie Darko, I’m not well read on American literature much. Obviously this turn of phrase may not have been intended by Murakami when he wrote the book in Japanese, but he does worked closely with his English translators, so maybe it is intended.

Nakata set off down the hall, plastic bag with washbag inside in hand, to the communal sinks. …

… Finished, he took his plastic bag with washbag inside back to the room.

And from the last chapter;

Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there – to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.

More eloquent than what Bowie said.

Always iconic

Gaga got nothin on this

Picking up Kafka’s complete novels again, I also found a beautiful metallic bookmark in it from South Korea that I had been using. A tourist info place in Gyeongju was selling them and I bought several different ones as gifts.

It just says Korea – no North or South.

Murakami often criticises or applauds authors, philosophers, and musicians in his work, which gives an intriguing glimpse into his own influences. So as Kafka influenced Murakami, Murakami and Kafka now influence me – and millions of others, but there’s nothing better than a delusion of grandeur!!  

PP.

My no-frills summary;

Life Is Good.

Life is good, when wet

Life is good, in colour

Life is good, on your toes

Life is good, petal

Life is good, together

Life is good, up top

Happy Thursday.

Peter Parkorr.

Quick background – I’m @PeterParkorr, I started this blog Nov/Dec 2011 and this was my first travel blogging event of any sort – I havent even managed a #TTOT, #TNI or tweetup beforehand.

#TBUnite #TBUMBR organised by Oli Gradwell was in Umbria, Italy, as you probably know.

Friday 20th April was a day of 5 hour photo and video workshops for anyone interested who could arrive in time. 4 workshops ran concurrently and went either to Assisi or Perugia near to the conference centre http://www.vallediassisi.com/index.html

I attended a in-front-of and behind-the-cam video workshop by Rachelle Lucas aka @TravelBlggr – it was good! Very useful grounding for people new to these techniques, and she’s a pro obviously. Info on the other 3 workshops found by searching online, pal   .

Day 1 was

The schedule!! (viva technologia!)

As a very new travel blogger – I actually only just managed to get my travel site  (half) online a day before the conf, without much content etc over at www.travelfree.li – I found almost everything useful, new, relevant, and was also impressed by how easy it was networking with everyone who attended. I may gush a lot about it all, so thats why!

The conference packed a lot into a short space of time and so everyone is feeling tired now – but I’m sure tonight will be a good last stand in case we dont see each other in a long while again.

The conference opened with a key note speech from Jeff Jung @careerbreaksecrets in which he spoke about the need for all of us to take ourselves seriously, and to think like the ‘travel experts’ we are, not down-playing our talents simply as bloggers.

This was followed with a panel of speakers, some of the better known travel bloggers in attendance gave their own recap of the good / bad of the last year and where they thought things were going next. Good information from all including, Melvin of @traveldudes, Kash from @budgettraveller, Debbie from @fourBGB, and a rep from intrepid travel (no name, sorry!). Oliver also talked at various points and introduced a couple of new changes to the industry he saw coming – such as the need for our own ad-network, jobs board and more.

Now I will run down the talks I attended, just throwing out the choicest cuts of my notes.

Day 1 – 1. How to get google to love you, from @Calibre based up in Edinburgh, Scotland – they know what they’re doing. Very up to date information for beginners on how to be SEO friendly with the most ease to ourselves, esp. concerning upcoming google changes they expect, being treated as a real person using Authorship, lots more stuff. Some attendees had a LOT of questions but we got through all the material in the end and for the rest of the weekend Calibre basically helped a lot of people for free whenever they were spare. Cheers guys – brilliant!

Day 1 – 2. Take PR and marketing to the next level, by Debbie from FourBGB. I love Debbie! She’s a great speaker, easy to listen to, very good at handling questions and giving the right info. Despite talks being labelled Beginner / Intermediate / Advanced, most speakers waited to see who turned up, asked a few questions and then pitched as they saw fit. It worked well. Covered what you should expect from sponsorships/partnerships, what they should expect, the need for good media packs, results from their own market research, and many other ways to make your business easier to interact with for PR peeps.

Day 1 – 3. How not to implode wordpress, from @theaussienomad. Chris has ~12 years experience with computing, and 2.5 years of his own blogging and WP. So he doesnt claim to be an uber expert, but knows a vast amount for how long he has been in the game. His new site @RTWlabs is looking really good. Basically covered practical tips on WP Core, Plugins, and Themes with his own recommendations. Great stuff, just what I needed.

Day 1 – evening – a great meal in Perugia, see my twitter and everyone elses for snaps, and a talk from various Umbria tourist board folk, and best of all a chat with Steve McCurry about his photography and opinions on photography. A belter of a bonus! Fun shinanigans in the hotel afterwards for some bloggers/PR, I’m sure evidences will surface soon   

[I got home at 3.30 to a venue outside of the resort by 3km on a borrowed bike - interesting. Would recommend you stay in resort in future for ease!!! Took a video I wanted to post and struggled with it / vimeo / net connection til 6am before giving up, grabbing 2 hrs sleep and heading back into the conf]

Day 2 – 1. How to get big brands sponsorship – from @theplanetd Dave and deb. These guys had so much to say, it was really crammed in there, I could listen to them a lot longer!! They are obviously doing well because of their hard work and experience, they really hit all the important aspects of marketing, branding, professionalism, working practices, industry expectations, where the industry is now, where it should be if we all want to do well – loads of stuff!!  See some of my tweets for the best tip from each sessions I went to. www.twitter.com/PeterParkorr

Day 2 – 2. Beth Whitman @wanderlusting on revenue streams. Beth covered 13 different income streams that are easy enough to use, and I think she used 11 herself but focussing on less now, to concentrate on the most effective ones. Good advice on pitfalls to avoid, whether you should even consider text links and banners, more branding, advice on good blogging, a lot of feedback on her personal experience of working in the insdustry and how much work is needed, and as with all the other talks, a very useful Q&A at the end.

Day 2 – 3. Spicing up your travel writing, by Abi King @insidetravellab – I had spoken to Abi quite a bit before her talk and was looking forward to it. She comes from several useful and unique (to travel blogging certainly) backgrounds and knows a lot about writing. She is also a top class speaker! [I have had corporate jobs in the past, have studied quite a bit academically, very interested in business, so not new to the world, I know a well prepared, concise, targeted talk when I see one]. She hit the nail on the head for anyone interested in improving the quality of their words, even people who already write well.

Day 2 – 4. I did some networking, and missed out on hearing Keith from @velvetescapes and Janice @solotraveller, as well as missing Mike Sowdon speak in an earlier session (and more, WildePR, Andy Hayes, more?). This speed networking was useful – I already knew everyone I chatted to quite well but it was ideal to be able to concentrate only on shop and see if we were actually useful to each other. I’m very interested to go to Finland this summer myself for a few months after chatting to Virpi from @visitfinland, and Berlin after speaking to Diana from @visitberlin  

The last part of the conference was the biggest event for my mind. Oliver recapped some things from the industry, and left the floor for Jodi from @legalnomads to give her speech. I can say it was at least 90% new revelations in the bare facts to most attendees. On Jodi – she was a complete natural! Very relaxed as a speaker, she surprised most people with her humour and the crowd loved her for the exact point she was trying to make – dont just be a travel megaphone on twitter – be a real person. We heard about her love of space and geekiness, and how she has been shat on by 13 birds and 1 bat in her travels so far – all examples of bizarre parts of her life that her twitter audience related to. I really hope her speech is made available online – there was so much more she talked about worth listening too. She also mentioned 4/5 apps I had never heard of, and I can list about 40 twitter related apps that I have played with in the last 5 months of trying to get to grips with every bit of social media (more posts I have been meaning to write for weeks coming soon…   altho Jodi may well have just made them all obselete).

The apps were StrawberryJ.am, news.me, Percolate, and ManageFlitter (I knew that one) and the similar SocialBro Chrome extension, and Followerwonk.com. There were ZERO questions for Jodi at the end of her speech. My theory? People were a little in shock as to how well Jodi knew the twitter/socialmedia field, and how much we have to go away and learn. Some stuff simple – some complex. My opinion is that she has made her own life harder now as a lot of people will want more direction from her! Which she may or may not enjoy       Well done Jodi, made the conference.

Afterwards a final panel of Melvin, Janice, Debbie, Debs from theplanetD, and intrepids rep lady (I will find out her name asap) walked us through a tete a tete they had all had the evening before, about how travel bloggers and PR co’s can reduce each of their respective headaches from each other. This was also a conference highlight for me – a few others such as Angie from tbc who is a blogger and PR lady, Amy from @jetsettergypsy, Ken Kaminesky, Jeff Jung  and a few others, voicing their ideas of the industries best direction for working together smoothly (bloggers and PR firms/money spenders), which I hope to be continued somewhere accessible online.

That is all I have to report for now! There was tonnes more I could mention but I want to get on my bike back to the hotel and hang out with everyone again instead. And pack for the bloggers-only post conference tours tomorrow (I’ve bagged a white water rafting, zip lining, nature and adventure tour with 19 others).

I apologise for the poor standard of my reporting, and especially for details and people I have forgotten. Anyway, maybe a useful first idea of what went on here. I look forward to being part of this passionate and talented community in the future, near and far (gush gush gush).

Thanks to Oliver and all his (growing) team for arranging it, all the speakers and contributors, and the sponsors.

Arrivederci!

@PeterParkorr

and @SenorSunset specifically for #travel and #photography purposes.

http://twitter.com/#!/PeterParkorr/status/194154115377545217/photo/1

Nevermind, here’s some pictures that represent this (or last) week’s theme ‘Through’, although I think almost every shot I have from Valleta, Malta, could fit here nicely…

Through Malta's famous Mdina Glass

Through the arms of another reveller

Through a run of grapevines, Sicily

Through a rain drop, landing exactly at the wrong time and place

Through some frozen undergrowth in Hokkaido, Japan

Through thick and thin...

Peter Parkorr

The first photo’s were taken in Varkala, a popular beach for tourists along the coast of Kerala, India.

And the thoughts; Why is the world the way it is? Why is the quality of your life more dependent on your place of birth than on your IQ? Why do some people have more things than they need, and others don’t have basic education, food, or water?

They remind me a little of ‘The shame of Italy’ story that you may have read, about tourists sunbathing while the bodies of two drowned Roma girls lay nearby on the sand for 6 hours.

Do the tourists in these photo’s work as hard at home as the labourers working next to them? Do we have less physically demanding jobs because we are better educated? Why are e better educated? Are our jobs more important, and to who?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but the author of an interesting book I am reading at the moment might. The book is ‘23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism‘  by Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean professor of economics at Cambridge. It’s a captivating and informative read to say the least, I highly recommend it. It disperses many widely held mis-truths about modern societies and economies, with clever and well thought out presentation of data that flies in the face of common ‘knowledge’. The author is not standing on a soap box and shouting ‘The end is nigh’, but merely questioning why we assume our beliefs are correct, illustrating his points with good journalistic impartiality.

Judge this book by whichever cover you prefer

I’d like to finish this post with some other photo’s from India, 1) because I haven’t really published any of the thousands I took, and 2) because I met a traveller the other day who was essentially afraid to go there because she had heard only scare stories about the bigger cities, and the most extreme of the East-West cultural differences. My advice, if you are able to visit India, is do! Travelling in India is not always easy, but is completely worth the effort.

It’s worth noting that of the almost 5 months that I was in India, I spent the majority of my time working in remote parts of South India (Karnataka and Kerala, and near the border of Tamil Nadu) as a project manager with UK charity Raleigh, a completely different experience to being a backpacker. It meant forming longer term relationships with the local villagers and charity partners, and getting to see how these people, completely removed from modern cities or towns, lived from day to day.

I think I could go on adding photo’s from India for a very long time, but a quick look at some of my favourite | other | photo | Pressers confirms that you can’t have too many good photo’s! These are certainly some of my favourites, and it’s a start. They are actually only the highlights of my highlights, I didn’t have time yet to go back through the mother lode. The varied finishes are not very aesthetic as a set, but I’m still experimenting and also deciding whether watermarks are really necessary.

More soon,

PP

The first shot was taken during an all-day barbequeue in Catania, where I retrieved my camera from it’s hiding place specifically to capture the slats of light filtering through some overhead bamboo. My unwitting subjects are from Germany, USA and Italy, it was a great multi-cultural affair.

The second shot is from Catania’s pescheria (the daily fish market) where I wandered about taking snaps. It didn’t take me long to realise the best part of the market was the loud back and forth conversations between the fish sellers, alongside their typically Italian emphatic hand gestures. I switched to my zoom lens to try and capture the atmosphere discreetly, without too much success. This gent was easier to shoot as he wasn’t busy jumping up and down like the rest of them!

Below are some more shots from the pescheria that capture a little of the atmosphere and the ‘Italian-ness’ of the market sellers. I haven’t edited any of these, and probably could have got better shots if I hadn’t been afraid of upping the ISO setting on my camera! Some of the guys are busy bantering with each other and bartering prices with customers, while others work behind the stalls to prepare the seafood that’s ordered, only looking up to chuckle or show irritation at all the blurb.

Mental note made to go back and snap some more soon. This week I am also publishing photo’s for the theme ‘Indulgence‘ (from last week), although I nearly used that same set here as ‘Contrast’. However, I chose these photo’s from India for their message rather than for composition or light.

Peter Parkorr