There’s a lot of ways to travel these days.
I just can’t keep up with all the different types of tourism and all the neologisms people have invented to describe things that are amply covered by existing words. (Take the arrival of “gocation”, the opposite of “staycation”. That one hurt).
However, I keep my ear to the ground.
Check these out. Next big thing, ‘kay?
It’s all the rage. It’s the ultimate macho way to camp. It’s CRAMPING (an elegant marriage of “crap” and “camping”).
Here’s a typical press release:
“Men! Ask yourself – does camping make me look manly? Answer – no. Nowadays any effete fool can fling up a dome tent or thread a guy rope through a bar-stitched point. They say it’s ‘for the best’. They say it’s ‘good’ to make camping easier. Easier? This is womanly thinking. Women want to humilate men, to rob them of their godgiven right to demonstrate brute strength and imply fecundity of the loins by accidentally hammering a tent peg through their foot (and similar indicators of masculinity).
And let’s not even begin with glamping, eh, guys?
So, modern camping. It’s wimpy. It’s wrong. It stops here. Gather round, men! There’s a new way, a better way to spend the night under canvas!
Picture this.
1) You arrive at campsite reception to be kept waiting for 2 hours, frustration furrowing your brow. Then you hand over an excessive amount of money for an ancient A-frame tent riddled with scabrous holes, galloping mould and perished rubber guys that explode under the puniest strain. Your woman will cling to you with horror at the sight of it! RAAAR! You are strong!
2)Then you’ll be led away by a surly, uncommunicative campsite administrator to a patch of tractor-churned quagmire – your home for the night. Your guide will then wait to be tipped with whatever money you have left in your pockets and/or wallet.
3) But there’s more! Once you have succeeded in creating something analogous to a fully-pitched tent, a herd of Highland bulls will be herded into the vicinity with klaxons and smoke grenades.
4) Campsite staff will continue to keep things lively throughout the night with loud music, car headlights and refrigerated power-hoses played against the side of your dwelling, paying special attention to the patch of ground you’ll crawl over when you emerge in the morning.
Optional extras: for a pre-arranged fee, game dogs will be encouraged to copulate against the tent wall / marksmen will attempt to shoot through guy ropes with ‘noisemaker’ rounds / local communities will assemble to sing “Kumbaya” and “The Happy Wanderer”, accompanied by a heavily amplified skiffle band.
Throughout, you will broadcast your mettle by remaining positive and confident that you’ll mentally and physically survive the night, despite the apparent evidence to the contrary.
You will be MAN.
Can you really afford to truly miss the ultimate gender-reinforcing holiday?”
Note: Unfortunately cramping has as yet failed to take a hold in the UK, as many campsites offer these services as standard for no additional fee.
If extreme travel just isn’t extreme enough for you…welcome to the exciting, dangerous world of BUNGEE CLIMBING!
“With an elasticated cord tethering you to the ground, attempt to scale obstacles without being plucked screaming off them! Test your mettle against climbing walls, enjoying the thrilling agony and panic of those last few feet. Then, if you survive, work your way up to local mountain peaks before saving up for the ultimate bungee-climbing experience – Everest, without oxygen and under massive tension!
Please note, we only recommend using an experienced bungee climbing team that can accurately judge the length of cord you’ll need for a both achievable and challenging climb. You may have read about recent (largely sensationalist) reports in the popular media of low-quality cords parting under high pressure, catapulting the shrieking climbers off the other side of the mountain. This is inflammatory and misleading. The air’s far too thin up there to make any real noise.”
Spurred on by the boom in “Eat Pray Love” tourism, here’s the next big thing…the ESL EXPERIENCE!
“Based on Lynn Truss’s popular grammar-busting book Eats Shoots And Leaves, the ESL Experience takes you around the world in a quest to find the world’s most obvious spelling mistakes.
For those seeking instant gratification, the Home Tour takes you round London and New York, kitting you out with a chauffeur-driven car, a megaphone, a spray-can and a large marker pen – everything you need to ridicule and correct spelling mistakes you find, whether on restaurant menus, shop signs, billboards or people’s clothing. (We can’t always guarantee the locals will respond favourably, but remember – bad spelling is a sign they’re ignorant, so it’s for their own good).
And for the more adventurous, take the Away Tour to learn a new language so you can use your new knowledge to belitte and correct an entirely different culture, making the world a better place!
Note: as other cultures can be less open-minded about their own grammar, your car will be armour-plated and your chauffeur will be ex-SAS.”
Note: oh blimey, it’s been done.
No full-length press release as yet for STEREOTOURISM (“Ever gone abroad and been disappointed that your smallminded prejudices about other cultures don’t fit reality? We’re here to help!”) or GEOCRASHING (“Smash your car into the side of a stranger’s house! It’s the fun new GPS-assisted real-world player-vs-player sensation from the team that brought you World Of Walmart“).
I’ll update you when I know more.
Images: Mike Miley, maessive, Shahram Sharif, Steve Bullivant and Arturo de Albornoz.
Creative input: @DaveHagerman, @serap_tweets, @thenotoriousmeg, @lazolounge, @cherilucas, @koangirl, @ieatmypigeon, @amybp, @TravelSavvyKayt and @nickelmoon.
I am permanently on ESL vacation. My two years in Japan were intense, but the rewards were great. But my favorite vacation moment probably came from New York City; a deli next door to my apartment sold “muzzalela sandwiches.”
There’s one from my home town that haunted me for years, a restaurant called…
” Cloggies In’ ”
No matter how you creatively interpret it, it never works. Every time I went past it, my mind went down a new grammatical rabbit-hole, seeking something to grab onto. But alas.
Ever spot Japanese spelling mistakes when you were on the street? Ever *corrected* Japanese spelling?
Japanese spelling as in Japanese words, or Japanese misspelling of English words (i.e., Engrish)? Engrish, a million times. The usual suspects – crab/clab, clap/crap, falk/folk… the possibilities are endless, but the grammatical mistakes are the best. I’ve also spotted mistakes, less frequently, on signs when people write Japanese words, but usually it’s a transliteration issue.
My bigger pet peeves are Italian and English spelling mistakes. “Expresso”? Are they fucking kidding me? I’ll never understand why people insist on using foreign words and phrases they have no idea how to spell.
As for the English spelling mistakes, the most common ones I see are inserting a “u” in words like color, neighbor, and favor. Another common one is transposing the “e” and “r” in words like “center.” Ghastly stuff.
‘As for the English spelling mistakes, the most common ones I see are inserting a “u” in words like color, neighbor, and favor. Another common one is transposing the “e” and “r” in words like “center.” Ghastly stuff.’
Hmm, This (of course) is the English (or British) way to spell these words. So hardly ghastly. The difference between US and UK spellings of words such as ‘colour’ / ‘color’ is to do with the impact of French on English in the eighteenth/nineteenth century. English as spoken in the North America escaped these changes. Still as a British citizen seeing the Amerian spelling of these words in the UK is deeply irritating, one might even say ‘ghastly’.
It was a joke, Jimbo. Me being cheeky towards my British pals. Ha ha and that. Transatlantic humo(u)r. Wink wink, nudge nudge. Say no more, say no more.
I’m sorry, Liv. Jimbo and I have already despatched a gunboat. Restless colonials, and all that.
Don’t fret: we’ll have you docile and picking cotton in no time.
The English and American ways of spelling are sometimes more complex that they initially appear. Take “aluminum” and “aluminium”. Us Brits like to pour scorn on the apparently unnecessary excision of the “i” when the word crosses the Atlantic. Unfortunately for us Humphry Davy, the (British) inventor who coined the name for the element, called it “aluminum”.
So we Brits are wrong. We’ve added an “i” where no “i” belongs (unless you’re a pedantic critic of Davy’s, for he had a few).
Of course, in all other forms of spelling, the New Worlders are entirely in the wrong and need to be blockaded and shot at when they suggest otherwise. Hence the gunboat. (And yes, it’s on the way to Italy, not America, I know where you are, Liv).
Bring it on, blo(u)kes. I just got a new fly swattre.
Oh, and “expresso” is one I absolutely hate with a passion.
Mainly because for a short time in the early ’90s, that’s what I called it as well.
Cramping – YES!
Lots of spelling mistakes here in Egypt too, but a lot of the time it’s a transliteration issue. It does piss me off when visitors unduly mock the spelling… I’m like, “So how good’s your spelling of Molokheiya then… in Arabic script?”
But, what does get me is when somewhere will have multiple spellings in their menu of the same word. Really, how many ways are there to spell “fruit”? Pick one and go with it! Or, even better, somewhere that is setting itself up as coffee shop, yet manages to spell both “coffee” and “shop” wrong on their shiny new sign. No excuse for that.
Liv – behave yourself, or I’ll come kick you in the fanny! (And we’re talking British English here.)
Well, I never.
Yeah so re-reading that, it does come off as a bit more vulgar and a bit less funny than I’d intended. Apologies! (And to Mike, too, for sullying his blog!)
So, let’s scratch that, and go with this:
How about I pick up a chunk for nicely *coloured* *aluminium* off the *pavement*, from under the feet of the *homeless guy* who just *bummed* a *fag* off me, come over to Italy and…
; )
… and receive the first “proper” spelling lesson of your dark English life?
Culture fight culture fight. *waves pompoms*
Personally, I get round the thorny problem of American vs English vowel usage by removing them entirely from my manuscripts when I send them to editors. (eg. …rmvng thm ntrly frm my mnscrpts whn snd thm t dtrs…”). This way, they can add their own to suit the market they’re writing for. It’s an elegant solution (“lgnt sltn”) to the problem and also cuts down on keyboard wear & tear for the expenses-conscious writer.
Admittedly, I’ve yet to find an editor who has written back, other than one mss than came back with “Y fckng nttr” written across it in red pen. Well, give it time. I’m obviously ahead of the curve on this one.
Laugh so hard to neighbor came to see if I was all right. “Cramping?” Are you kidding me? that was what we caled vacation in the 50′s.
Since I don’t speak that English stuff you do I can’t comment on the spelling thing–altho Twitter has certainly given rise to some interesting literary phrasing.
You *do* speak that English stuff. Just not properly.
(*continuing cultural war theme established in previous comments*)
Twitter is bad – but mobile phone txts are the true Enemy.
I confess to snorting with laughter on reading the following in the article you linked to:
For fixing mistakes, Deck carried with him a transparent satchel filled with Sharpie pens in multiple colors, Wite-Out, chalk and crayons.
Correcting spelling errors with a product whose own name is incorrectly spelt seems to be the very height of irony.
There’s a good tip for businesses there, though: immediately make your bad spelling into a product or service, and you’re safe from roaming grammarians. It’s like cultural correction-fluid.
[...] on from my recent post about travel buzzwords, I wanted to share a link to an amusing piece about five new types of travel. ‘Bungee climbing’ and ‘cramping’ get a mention, but my favourite has to be [...]
I’ve probably done some of those, but since we Americans sometimes double up with a blotto vacation, I can’t be sure.
If you’re not sure if you’ve gone bungee-climbing or not, your life is eventful indeed, Judith.
I’ve always suspected as such, of course. I suspect there are countries where you’re an outlaw.
I don’t know what’s funnier, the post or the comments. Excellent, cramping sounds something we used to do in late 80′s early 90′s for supposedly fun family holidays where nobody spoke to each other for a week whilst sulking and sleeping in a tiny 4 man tent. Ahh, good times.
Sounds very similar to the thing Yorkshire people do in January, bundling into the family car to drive 50 miles to the coast through driving rain, the dog barking in the back and little Timmy and little Doris beating each other in the face with the Travel Monopoly board until they get told off by Ma and Pa, and then after an hour of that, the car arrives at a cliff-top alive with billowing sand and frigid ocean spray, and the car door is opened and everyone is sucked out, spends 15 seconds shrieking uncontrollably and then fights their way back in the car where they sit, windows steamed up and the air reeking of damp bread and cheap potted meat, until someone says “It’s good to get out” and someone replies “We must do this again”, which is the signal for everyone to bugger off home.
[...] 98. Fevered Mutterings – Mike Sowden started blogging back in 2004 when he wrote for the UK blogging network 20six, and for the past 18 months he has also been blogging for Ecosalon and WebUrbanist. Recommended posts: “Are You The Perfect Airport Sleeper?” and “Tourism Unbound: 5 Amazing New Types Of Travel.” [...]
awesome list!