Following Family And Friends Online: Mapping and Tracking Their Trekking From Grand Hotels to Gorgeous Guest Houses

What can you tell from this map?

The capital of Java, and Indonesia, is Jakarta, in the North-west. The plane symbol tells you that you can fly into Jakarta. On the far East of the island is the ferry crossing at Banyuwangi, to Bali.

The word Nusa means island. (You sometimes see Pulau, which also means island.)

Problem
You follow family and friends online. But you could go further. Map and track their treks. Note where they stayed, from Grand hotels to gorgeous guests houses. Maybe homely hostels or horrid Hostels. Some people put everything about their travels on Tripadvisor. That's enormously helpful.

A friend or family member tells you about their travels. 

Six months later they or you have forgotten that wonderful resort and hotel. They see you. 

You ask, "How was Bali?"

They answer, "It was Java."

Or you say, "You promised to take me to that wonderful hotel on Bali."

"Which one?"

"You must remember.

Malaysia mainland to the left.

"I don't know. I stayed in a dozen. I've thrown away all the brochures."

We went back to a clifftop hotel in Bali called Kupu-Kupu Barong, meaning butterfly. A repeated word is a plural in Malay-Indonesian (same language like British-American English). The swimming pool was small. I would have preferred the grander hotel with the big infinity pool but that was out of our price range.

Answers

You can ask for a copy of your friends' and family members' route in advance. Or help by making them a map.

Years ago my late father tracked me as I went around the USA on a Greyhound bus and sent home postcards.

Tracking
My parents were surprised to find that after travelling anti-clockwise, New York, San Francisco, LA, New Orleans, I reversed direction.

When I got home to London, I explained. I had waved goodbye to a British boy, flatmate of my boyfriend in London, who went south to Machu Pichu in South America. I linked up with a French girl who wanted to go clockwise and accompany me back to San Francisco!

Keeping a record, including research and photos, as they go, also helps watchers if you don't like the photo of place your traveller loved.

Look at a trek across Java. You might be thinking, "Yes, after your night on the mountain, a cold shower and a bench to sit at seems like heaven. But I would prefer a proper hotel with hot showers, mosquito nets and tablecloths."

Here's a record I've made, now I have time to gather together some of the hotel and homestay photos I have been sent and match them up with research on the names of the locations.

Banana Homestay

Several countries have accommodation called Banana Homestay. This one has wifi.

Bamboo Tales And Benches
On closer inspection, I find one interesting detail of local life. The wooden tables are made of lengths of bamboo. So are the benches.
The wall is painted yellow "like bananas" the photographer says. To copy the theme of the name of the homestay, Banana homestay.

Open Ceilings and Back Walls
The ceiling is covered with cloth. I presume this covers the open to the sky roof. This photo reminds me that you see open-to-the-sky roofs in Indonesian bathrooms. (We had one at the Kupu-Kupu Barong hotel in Bali). Public room buildings in Bali and Indonesia have an open roof.

Other rooms have an open side, sometimes next to a fence or wall covered with plants. The ladies toilets in the Night Safari in Singapore were this style. So was a Ladies toilet in a Community Centre in Singapore.

Researching Bali and Java's Nayuwangi
Banyuwangi is your stop in Java, after arriving on the ferry from Bali, or catching the ferry back to Bali.

Banyuwangi Regency is not a five-star hotel but a place.

Wikipedia enthuses:
Banyuwangi Regency is a region on the eastern tip of Java, Indonesia, just west of Bali over the Bali Strait. It has diverse nature areas with protected jungle and marine life. The volcanic Ijen Crater features a turquoise lake 1 kilometre in diameter. The crater's naturally igniting sulfur creates distinctive blue flames that can be seen during nighttime hikes.

Sounds really interesting, if you are into hiking.

Banana Homestay
I looked at the photo of the Banana Leaf Homestay. I need a chair with a back.

I looked up the Banana Homestay guesthouse on Tripadvisor. People have such different experiences of the same place. One said you have to get a taxi or Uber. Another said the hotel owners picked them up personally.

Several spoke warmly of the trip to Ijen. I went onto Wikivoyage and found a photo. Unfortunately, it said that due to volcanic activity the night excursions are banned, and daytime hikers see nothing inside the crater because it is filled with smoke.
However, in July 2018 my friends planned a trip. They also scheduled climbing Raung. They were hanging around the guesthouse overnight, waiting for other members of the group to fly in next monring.

Ijen Crater from Wikivoyage.

I read the accounts again, paying more attention to every detail. You need torches, okay, and gas masks! Not okay.

That's the great advantage of being the stay at home armchair traveller. You can enjoy seeing all the sights, well away from the inconvenience of cancelled trips - and potential danger!

On the other hand, I went hitch-hiking in Madeira. After we had booked, I read that we need torches to walk through the tunnels. I was alarmed. But I never went near a tunnel. The serious hikers marched along the longer trails through tunnels. I stayed with the slow group, plodded along the easier paths, stopping to take photos as I went.

Scheduled Travel Posts
Meanwhile, I schedule my posts so they come up a few days or weeks later, for security reasons. Also to be sure I have posted every day even when I am away and can't write. 

Time Needed To Write Reports And Posts
You'd be amazed how long it takes to edit a post. Up to three hours. You can't do that on holiday.

TripAdvisor Reviews I am a keen reviewer on Tripadvisor. I like to be able to look back at my own reviews.

 Your Reviews Are Your Records - But For How Long?
I hope the Tripadvisor management won't take down old reviews. One person in the audience at a session on Tripadvisor at the World Travel Market, said that reviews over a month old were out of date and not relevant. 

I disagree. If you had a bad or good impression of a place a year ago, you need to recall what upset you and whether that issue has since been addressed. When I wrote regularly fora Trusted Places, I assumed my reviews would last forever. It was like a blog, a record of my trips. Then the company was taken over by Yell (Yellow Pages) who decided to concentrate on the UK and drop all the foreign reviews. 

I had not taken the precaution of writing them all in draft on my laptop before loading them up, but wrote them directly onto their form. As a result all those hours of work vanished forever. The photos. The amusing descriptions and funny phrases. All gone.

A relative of mine does not write on Tripadvisor. He treats it like Ebay. He thinks if you have a complaint you should first approach the management privately and give them a chance to put things right. Not tell the world.

Tracking Trips On the other hand, having everything duplicated on your laptop or phone means you soon run out of space. So how else can you keep track of your trips and those of family and friends?

Mapping and Tracking Trips and Treks

You can download and print a map to follow a friend's journey. Or make an online map.

I am a member of the AA. My father was for years. The sent him a certificate when he was in his nineties.

For planning my next trip, I like to keep a record of the tourist boards:

Also check the Tripadvisor reports on scams, such as a car driver-cum-trip-organizer refusing to go unless you pay a surcharge for photos when the location has no such charge.

• Banyuwangi Government Culture and Tourism Service, Jl. A. Yani 78, ☎ +62 333 424172, e-mail: pemasaran@banyuwngitourism.com. edit

• Tourist Information Centre, Ketapang Harbour (ASDP), Jl Gatot Subroto, Ketapang.

• Alas Purwo National Park Head Office, Jl A Yani 108. ☎ +62 333 428675.

USEFUL WEBSITES

AA Route Planner

theaa.com

http://www.theaa.com/route-planner/index.jsp

Travel Timeline in the TripAdvisor app, but I can't find it.  

These people want from £9 a month

https://www.breathehr.com/holiday-management-software

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

America in the 18oos - wagons, trains and the Donner party

When I went to the USA in the 1900s I heard about American history. The British were fond of saying, "America has no history." Absolutely not true.

The Donner Party
One of the dramatic stories I heard for the first time when I visited the USA was about the Donner party disaster. When was it? I just looked it up. 1846.

I am now writing a novel set in 1880, the time when my great grandfather in Europe would have been deciding whether to emigrate from Lemberg (Lvov, or Lviv) in Ukraine, to the UK or USA? What would have influenced his decision? How fast could he have travelled?

The pioneer Donner party were travelling overland to California, in a series of wagons.

The journey would have taken four to six months. That wasn't from New York to California. That was just the last leg of the journey.

Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City is a place everybody has hard of. Most tourists see the city but don't think much about the salt or the lake. The Donner party got caught in the salt flats which took much longer to cross than they'd expected. My family read a book about this and recall reading, "The people ran out of water. The wagons got bogged down in the salt. The horses went mad from dehydrating after licking on the salt."

One man killed another and was sent off to ride alone into the wilderness. He said. He survived.

Snow
The others were caught up in the winter snow before they could cross the mountains. Out of water and food. They started dying.

Cannibalism
The survivors resorted to cannibalism.

Railway Revolution
So what was the situation a couple of decades later? The railways were the revolution. America built more railways than anywhere else in the world.

In the time of my great grandfather, a train from New York could travel, leaving New York state on a Monday, arriving by Thursday night.

Travel Time
As my family point out, trains could travel overnight. Horses and drivers of wagons had to stop every night.

Only the rich travelled in comfort. According to an article in Wikipedia, the rich might be on business or pleasure, sitting in style on padded seats, made up into padded beds at night.

Seating and Bedding
The poorer emigrants sat on wooden benches. They slept at night on the wood, I presume. Even so a lot better than the wagon trains 1946.

Comfortable Modern Trains
Now you can travel in style by train, in cars designed to give grand views to tourists who are not in a hurry, across the USA or Canada. Again, its a scenic and comfortable journey, if you can afford it.

Cheaper By Bus?
I travelled on a Greyhound bus as a student. I loved it. I would not do that now. Even so, it's a lot better by bus than overland like the Donner party.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.
Author of twenty books. To be published shortly: The Tailor And The Spy; The Tailor's Travels.

Saucy Post - another saucy post

Let's start simply again. Think of it this way. White sauces are made with flour added to liquid such as white milk. Brown sauces from stock such as meat or fish. the third variation is adding an egg.

Then we come to some place names. From the French point of view, the espanol is from south of where they are on the map, a thick brown sauce. (Think go south for more sun, thicker skin, brown like a tan.)

(Incidentally, some Indian sauces are the same, at least as a memory aid. Mild korma which is a white sauce from the cooler north. Hot sauces, and spicy sauces, such as Madras made with c h i l i, from further south. On the other hand, the animals are in the north, whilst the vegetarians are in the south - so you get vegetarian foods.)

In France you get the butter based dishes in the north, in Normandy (the word comes from the root Nor - same as the English county of Norfolk meaning north folk). The oil based dishes are from the south. The north is where you get countryside like southern England, with cows providing milk and meat.

In the south you get olive trees and olive oil. Just like driving for days through the American corn belt on a Greyhound bus taught me geography of the USA, driving through Spain and Italy seeing the vineyards on the cooler hillsides, and the gnarled olive trees in the south taught me how geography affects food and wine production.

You don't have to travel by bus and car nowadays. You can check the geography of any country with Google maps, even as detailed as street view showing the wineries, animals in the fields,  fishing boats on beaches, and food factories and trees in the streets and gardens, such as the coconut palms and oil palms.

If you are stuck for hours at an airport, or waiting in a restaurant for friends to turn up, you can amuse yourself by translating the menu and when your friends arrive they will be ever so impressed by the fact that you arrived early and have detailed knowledge of the menu. You will probably know more than the serving staff, who will greet you like an old friend if you know their home area and its produce.

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and speaker.