I am so very excited to share an exciting new venture with you today! Created by one of my VERY favorite authors, Dave Fox, Globejotter Tours is an extraordinary way to travel - and learn to write about travel! We've interviewed Dave about one of his books, Globejotting: A Travel Journaling How-To.
We've also shared the details of his latest tour in Botswana - an adventure I sure wish I'd been a part of. His travel philosophy just clicks with ours - independent travel, living within a culture, learning from the country you're visiting, and truly experiencing life off the beaten "tourist" path.
Floating market produce vendor in the Mekong River
We were lucky to sit down and talk with Dave about Globejotter Tours, travel writing, independent travel, learning from locals, cookies, and more. Here's what he had to say...
Dave Fox in VIetnam with family
WE: Please tell us about your new company, Globejotter Tours...
DF: I've been teaching travel journaling classes for years, and this is something I've wanted to do for a long time -- take my classes on the road and help people write about their trips as they unfold. So Globejotter Tours is a unique company in that our tours aren’t just tours; they include journaling and creative writing classes along the way to help people write about their travels.
Our primary focus is on getting out and exploring. I don't ever want anyone to feel like they missed out on experiences or cultural adventures because they were cooped up in a writing class. We fit the classes into our schedule at times when they won’t intrude upon the rest of the journey, and I’m always happy to recommend alternative activities for anyone who doesn’t feel like writing on any given day. (We often get travel partners, where only one of the two is interested in writing. And some people who don’t have big writing aspirations, and just think we have a cool travel philosophy and itineraries. They’re welcome to go do their own thing when it’s time to write.) But for people who want to improve their travel writing – whether it’s personal journaling, blogging, or writing more polished travel tales that they can publish – I help them work toward those goals as we explore.
On a two-week tour, we include around seven one-hour writing classes. We begin with a crash course in how to write a great travel journal. Then we take those "rough draft" journals to a higher level and shape them into more polished travel tales. We also do some group sightseeing and arrange some group meals, with local guides to help things run smoothly, and we offer a fair amount of free time as well. In order to find great stories to write, people need to go have their own, individual experiences. So we get them oriented and comfortable finding their way around each place we visit. Then we set them free for a few hours to see what they can discover on their own.
Kattina's Journal
Dave Fox teaching in Botswana
WE: What was the genesis of Globejotter Tours?
DF: It's been a long journey, actually. I've been guiding tours in Europe for Rick Steves' travel company since 1995, and I’ve worked for many years as a freelance travel and humor writer. I also teach a variety of writing classes. My travel journaling workshops evolved into my book, Globejotting, and the book became the launching pad for my tours.
I meet people all the time who try to write about their travels but feel stymied by a couple of challenges: They either feel like their journals fall flat and fail to capture the essence of their journeys, or they just can't find time to write at all in the middle of an exciting trip. My classes and my book help people overcome these obstacles. But when you teach travel journaling classes to people at home, the exercises are all based on trips that have happened in the past. I wanted to offer more a hands-on experience, so now, I’m replicating my classes in places like Botswana and Vietnam.
I thought about doing this for a long time before I finally decided to go for it. I’ve got a lot of experience as a tour guide and writing instructor, but starting a tour company and running a business is a big, scary leap for someone whose talents lie more on the creative side of the brain. What finally spurred me to go for it was spontanaity, a super cheap ticket to Vietnam, and the need for an excuse to buy that ticket.
I had been to Vietnam twice before with my girlfriend, Kattina. We were instantly captivated by the country. On our second trip, we got engaged there. So… I love my fiancée and all that good stuff, but last fall, I was aching to go back to Saigon and there were some amazing airfares. The problem was, Kattina teaches middle school science and she was right in the middle of her school year so she couldn't come with me. She’s incredibly patient with my travel schedule when I’m working, but I had been away a lot over the summer, guiding tours in Europe. Zipping off to Vietnam for a vacation without her wasn’t a cool thing to do.
I finally convinced her I had to go to Vietnam because I wanted to get my tour company off the ground. I promised I’d follow through and take it seriously… and you don’t break a promise like that if you want to keep your engagement intact. I have to say, she’s been extremely supportive. So I spent eight exhausting days blitzing through places I'd been before – Saigon, the Mekong Delta, and the South China Sea coast – with a new focus
and a tour guide’s eye. After a lot of work, the logistics have fallen into place nicely, and here we are!
Vietnam Rice Field
Dave's friends at a Saigon Restaurant
Dave working very hard on tour research
WE: What makes these tours different from other tour groups?
DF: Well, the obvious answer is the writing classes. My goal is that people will come home with richer travel journals than they’ve written in the past, and some great material they can shape into more polished travel stories if they want to. The writing lessons will stick with them in future travels, so on future trips by themselves, they’ll know how to write about things more descriptively and efficiently than they have in the past.
What's been interesting as the tours have evolved is the writing classes are also helping to shape a richer overall experience. For one thing, I teach writing techniques to help people write about their travels in more vivid detail, and those techniques have the added bonus of helping people be more aware of, and in tune with, their surroundings as they explore. In addition, because of the writing classes, we limit our groups to 12 people per tour.
If you get bigger than that, the writing classes just aren’t as good. But keeping our groups small also enables us to do things you can’t pull off with a larger group.
On our recent writing safari in Botswana, for example, we met with an elderly tribal chief in a village that had never seen a tourist before. He spoke no English, but we had a local guide to translate for us. The chief invited us to sit down under a big, shady tree outside his hut, and he told us all about his personal experiences with the tribe’s migration over the decades, how their culture is changing, and how their village justice system works, among other things. It was a spontaneous, fascinating chat we had. In Vietnam, we're going to go grocery shopping at a village market with a local resident. Then, we’ll have a cooking class. Each person will cook his or her own lunch. You could never do that with a busload of 50 people. We can also be more flexible and spontaneous -- two things that open us up to unscripted, surprise moments that can become our richest cultural experiences.
I know the word "tour" scares some independent-minded travelers away, but really, those are the sorts of people we like on our tours. Anyone who needs to have every minute of every day planned for them probably isn’t going to like what we do. Or, maybe they will, once they see the difference. But I really believe the best travel stories can’t be planned in advance. People need to get a little bit lost and stumble onto them. On the evenings when we have group dinners (which we’ll do about half the time), everyone’s going to have great stories to share.
Botswana Kalahari spear game
Dave Fox with Kalahari Bushmen
Dave Fox and a friendly mandolin player at a park in Saigon
WE: What sorts of writing do you teach on the tours? What sorts of people are they for?
DF: The classes are a combination of travel journaling and more polished creative nonfiction and storytelling. Our first class is always a crash course in travel journaling to help people journal more efficiently, and with the sort of detail you need to write a good travel tale. From there, it’s up to each person’s individual goals. Some people are journaling for themselves. Some want to share their stories with friends and family or put them on a blog or into a scrapbook. Others want to publish their travel tales professionally in books or magazines or on travel websites.
One of the things I stress is that whatever their goals are, nobody should try to create their best writing while they travel. That’s one of the fastest ways to smother a good travel diary. People get so bogged down in trying to create greatness that they don’t get anything written, or their writing starts to interfere with their travel experiences. So I teach techniques to get as much detail onto the page as efficiently as possible. After each tour, I offer two free follow-up sessions by phone or e-mail for anyone who wants help turning their “rough draft” travel diaries into something more polished.
Globejotter Tours mascot Sven Wondermoose says hello to a lion
Dave Fox's coffee break at a roadside cafe in Vietnam. Photo by Tran Phuc
Kattina Rabdau in Vietnam with school kids
WE: You can find a story anywhere, I think. You've traveled extensively - where are you headed next?
DF: Actually, I’m recovering right now from a pretty insane travel schedule the last few months – Vietnam in December, Botswana in January, and Mexico in February – so I’m enjoying some time at home in Seattle right now. In late June, I’ll head back to Scandinavia and then further south in Europe to guide tours for Rick Steves. Then in October, I’ve got my Vietnam tour. I also just had a meeting in Denver this past weekend with my Africa partner. We did a great writing safari in Botswana in January, and we’re hoping to offer more Africa tours in the next year or two.
As far as finding a story anywhere goes, if you think about it, life is really just a vast network of stories. We’re each living our own unique stories, and intersecting with other people’s stories. When we wander outside our cultural comfort zones, our stories get more exciting. But yeah, you can find great stories anywhere. They’re all around us. The trick is learning how to identify them and share them in entertaining, compelling, useful ways.
Vietnam homestay
Journaling on Lantau Island Hong Kong
Vietnam - Mekong River floating markets
WE: How did the Botswana writing safari go? What happened?
DF: Botswana is an incredible place. I partnered with Bill Given, a wildlife biologist who owns a safari company in Denver called the Wild Source. Bill led our group on game drives and I taught writing classes. Honestly, I didn’t have a burning desire to go look at wild animals for 10 days, but watching a herd of 40 wildebeest have a big, late-night party at a watering hole, or being mock-charged by elephants, or just watching fiery red sunsets across the Okavango Delta night after night, are things you can’t fully appreciate until you experience them.
For me, travel has always been about meeting and connecting with people. Our encounter with the chief that I mentioned earlier was fascinating. My highlight on the trip – and seriously, one of my all-time highlights in my life – was meeting a group of Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert. Neeltje, the owner of one of our safari lodges, was a woman of Dutch descent who was born and raised on a farm in rural Botswana. She grew up speaking fluent Naro, the San Bushman language, and she grew up playing with Bushman kids. She took six of us out to meet some of her friends one day and it was an incredible exchange. It’s 2010, and these people are still living out in the Kalahari Desert, digging for water and storing their water underground in the shells of ostrich eggs, dressing in kudu hydes, and living off the land – and they seem genuinely content with life. Their sense of humor was awesome!
Near the end of the day, they tried to teach Bill and me how to play a spear-throwing game. I was pathetic at it and realized I would starve very quickly if forced to hunt for food the way they do. Bill and I then taught them how to play Frisbee. They had never seen a Frisbee before, but they did a far more respectable job at mastering it than Bill and I did with their spear game.
When we visit foreign cultures, I really think we need to see tourism as a two-way street. It’s important not to force our culture on anybody else, but the Bushmen were as interested in us as we were in them, and I was thrilled when I realized I had this small Frisbee stashed in my backpack. They taught us their games. We taught them ours. Our lives are about as different from each other’s as is humanly possible, but we connected and hung out for the day and had fun. It might sound contrived, but really, at the end of the day, I was reminded that people can connect with each other, learn from each other, and have a good time together, no matter how differently our cultures, lifestyles, or personal perceptions of life are.
I will soon be announcing a new Botswana writing safari. It will be sometime in February or March. Anyone who wants first priority when it opens can e-mail me at dave[at]GlobejotterTours.com
Dave Fox with curious kids in the village of Sankoyo Botswana
WE: You've got an upcoming tour to Vietnam - can you please tell us more about that?
DF: I’ve become infatuated with Vietnam in the last couple of years. It’s an amazing country in so many ways. I’m actually trying to convince my fiancée, Kattina, to move there. (Ummm… with me, of course.)
The tour will focus on the southern part of the country. We’ll travel with a good friend of mine who’s a licenced tour guide, who was born in the Mekong Delta and now lives in Saigon. We’ll spend four nights in Saigon, three days in the Mekong area, four nights near a South China Sea fishing village, and then we’ll wrap things up back in Saigon.
We’re going to hit the sightseeing highlights, of course, like the floating markets in the Mekong Delta, the War Remnants Museum and Cu Chi Tunnels where people hid underground for weeks at a time during the war, and some lavish temples. We’re also throwing in some special experiences like the cooking school I mentioned earlier. We’ll see a performance of traditional Vietnamese music. On another day, we’re going to hire a large, private motorboat for the group, and we’ll have a writing class as we cruise down the Mekong River. (Of course there will also be plenty of time to enjoy the scenery.
Another thing I’m going to do in Saigon is invite some of my English-speaking friends to come hang out with us one night at an outdoor barbecue restaurant. I really think it’s important when you travel to get to know the people whose countries you visit. Often, when tour companies organize a meeting with local people, it’s contrived, and staged for tourists. But I’ve made close friends in Vietnam, who I met at a park right across the street from our hotel. The park’s a place where it’s very easy to meet Vietnamese students who want to practice their English, so I’ll also take anyone who wants to come along over there.
Sadly, one of the most frequent questions people in America ask me about Vietnam is, “Is it safe?” America has an awkward history there, and some Americans are leery of how they’ll be received. But in three trips to Vietnam, I’ve never encountered anything other than sincere friendliness. People are focused on today and the future, and they’re happy to get to know us. Add scrumptuous cuisine, stunning scenery, and delightfully cheap prices into the mix, and Vietnam is downright idyllic.
Dave Fox in Saigon. Photo by Kattina Rabdau
WE: Is there anything else you'd like to share with us?
DF: Yes! Cookies! I would like to share chocolate chip cookies with all of your readers! Unfortunately, that is not possible for a variety of reasons, but if anyone who reads this signs up for my Vietnam tour, I will buy them a cookie in Saigon. Or maybe something more locally appropriate like a dragonfruit or some sticky-rice wine.
But seriously, travel to me has always been about connecting with people and diving deeper into a culture than most tourists do. I want to foster that on our tours, and I can do that with our small group size. I want people to come home bursting with stories. I want them to feel like they experienced things they couldn’t have experienced with a mainstream tour company, and I want the more independent-minded travelers in the group, the people who don’t normally take tours, to feel like they had unique adventures they wouldn’t have found on their own.
Vietnam - dragonfruit and mango
WE: Thanks so much, Dave. Your trips sound incredible - life-changing experiences. BRAVO!
For more information, please see:
http://www.globejottertours.com/
All photos courtesy and copyright Dave Fox except where noted.