Going Local Travel

I’d like to think this is a spoof, but it probably isn’t.

This week someone told me about a B&B in Buenos Aires called Abode that prides itself on its ‘full English’ breakfast. “Can they get ‘baked beans?” I asked instantly, trying not to salivate too obviously. I was told that if they can’t get baked beans, the owner has honed her own recipe. Perhaps I should [...]

Photo: Flickr Creative Commons by Falling Sky I’ve been travelling a lot recently with a friend who was recently made redundant from giant drinks company InBev (Stella, Beck’s, Bud etc etc). It has become a tradition for us to order a local beer and hold our breath as we check the label. More often than [...]

Here it is. Proof that the tourist-versus-traveller debate has run its course (as if we needed it). It has now been incorporated into an American Express ad campaign. I just spotted it on a BA billboard.

I’ve been up north in Salta for the past week, partly for work, partly to accompany visiting family. It was certainly a diverse trip in terms of accommodation, spanning everything from one night’s couchsurfing in a lovely family house in an outlying suburb to a night in an ultra sophisticated boutique hotel in the city [...]

  “There’s a great empanada place right near my house in Palermo,” I said to my Salteño friend recently. “Bah,” he scoffed. “Wait until you’ve been to Salta. Then you’ll know what a good empanada is.” Salta, in Argentina’s north west, is renowned for its empanadas and this week I finally got to check them [...]

I just read an interesting post on the At Home in Tuscany blog. In it the author addressed a decision by Grantourismo couple (and local travel supporters) Lara Dunston and Terry Carter to stay in Puglia. I’m not qualified enough on Italy to comment on this but the author wrote: Of all the hidden gems for [...]

Yes, I chose this headline to get your attention. I’m not being trivial and I don’t really think Facebook alone can stop a war. But I do have a serious point to make, if you bear with me. This Wednesday is Día de la Memoria in Argentina. It’s remembrance day to honour the 30,000 people who [...]

This week has seen the launch of LocalTravelMovement.com. It’s aim is to bring together supporters of local travel and it will act as a platform for the debate that is already going on around the web. I was involved in some of the early discussions and it got me thinking about trying to define ‘local travel’.

Well done Argentina for scoring an Oscar at the weekend for El Secreto de sus Ojos. The award for the Best Foreign Language Film does, indeed, go to the country not an individual filmmaker. And this isn’t the only little-known thing about this category.