Price for safety? Common sense

The Resources section of the text offers advice from 100 freelance journalists. Mark Broadhead of LonelyPlanet.com offers his advice on safety while traveling. According to Broadhead,

Scan your travel documents and email them to yourself. It was traditional to photocopy your passport and visas, travel insurance etc, and keep them in a separate part of your luggage. But that’s old school. These days, digital is best – that way your documents won’t go missing even if your bags do.

It may seem like a breeze, but be advised that teaching yourself to ride a motorbike or jet ski in a foreign country is probably unwise. In Thailand, for instance, 38 people a day die in scooter accidents. Nb some travel insurance policies won’t cover scooter-related injuries.


Travel writer as an Orwellian

Resources offers advice from 100 freelance journalists. Aaron Hamburger from the Matador Network offers this: Be an Orwellian. Here’s a tidbit from Hamburger’s article:

Orwell’s prime enemy was vagueness, dullness, and cliché. In his formulation, either you’re choosing language or language chooses you. Or as Orwell puts it: ‘Modern writing at its worst does not consist of picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images to make their meaning clearer. It consists of gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by somebody else.’