Category Archives: Travel writing

The big idea: is tourism bad for us?

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Wanderlust may be surging once more – but will travel really help us find what we’re looking for?

In 2019, the United Nations World Tourism Organization reported that international travel had increased to a record 1.4 billion tourist arrivals. It predicted a 3% to 4% annual increase in coming years. That didn’t happen, of course. At the end of 2021, international tourist arrivals were 72% below pre-pandemic levels with 1 billion fewer arrivals than two years earlier.

This is despite airlines’ ingenuity. During Australian lockdown, Qantas organised flights to nowhere: one left Sydney for a fly-by tour of Byron Bay and the Gold Coast, the Great Barrier Reef and Uluru; another in May last year took passengers to 43,000ft to see the blood-red supermoon.

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Race shapes travel: backpacking as a black woman

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In an extract from her new book, the Kenyan writer reflects on how guidebooks to Africa, with their warnings of danger, instilled fear in her – until a solo trip to Burkina Faso

The pitch-black night of the Sahara does not yield to the sunlight until it is good and ready, and when it does, it flees so fast you would think the place is constantly bathed in blinding light. Stark sunrises turn the giant dunes dull brown for a scant few seconds; for a handful of minutes, as the sun is creeping up the sky, the sand glows.

Then the sky cracks open and turns brilliant blue, and everything around you will shimmer in response. Until that moment when the blue scares off the dark, the dusty roads leading from Gorom-Gorom to Oursi, a small town outside a small town in northern Burkina Faso, are shrouded in the desert’s secrecy, blanketed by inscrutable darkness and breathtaking silence. Six nights a week, that is.

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Where now for travel? Lonely Planet closures point to an uncertain future

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As the travel publisher closes its Melbourne and London offices, a former guidebook writer asks what’s next for an industry in crisis

Covid-19 has changed everything. In particular, it has changed everything about travel. As a Lonely Planet writer you learn fast that change is the only constant on the road. Still, no one was expecting the changes announced last week: that Lonely Planet is to close its Melbourne production facility and London offices “almost entirely”, as well as its magazine and Trade and Reference division. However, the famous guidebooks will continue to be published, though they are temporarily on hold.

As travel has outpaced the growth of the global economy for the last eight years, Lonely Planet has grown to become the world’s largest travel publisher, accounting for 31.5% of the global guidebook market. But with planes grounded, borders closed and people quarantined, where travel is headed next is anyone’s guess. “[It’s] a sad and difficult day for all of us in the Lonely Planet family,” wrote managing director of publishing, Piers Pickard.

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