Making connections: the lock of love

The more I travel the more I make connections. Between people, places, cultures, countries, and all kinds of kooky things. The more connections I make, the more everything and everyone seems the same. In a heartening kind of way. And the more this crazy planet and my even crazier life seem to be like one big magical game of connect the dots. A puzzle I'm working on that I hope will never end. Sometimes the way things connect across the globe, between seemingly disparate points and things, surprises me. Other times it just makes so much sense. Uh-huh! Oh I get it! Right... And sometimes, the connections, those similarities, those little quirks, habits and customs we all share... well, they just make me smile. As we've been travelling a lot recently (well, pretty much constantly for 2.5 years to be precise!), I keep seeing a strange but wonderful custom everywhere... the habit of fixing these locks of love to a romantic place. Locks clamped to big old iron gates, fixed to fences that look out over a stunning landscape, and locks joined to beautiful bridges all over the world. From Syria to Cyprus, Turkey to Italy, everywhere people are fixing locks to places and throwing away (or giving to their loved-one?) the key. Locks carved, scratched and painted with messages of love: be mine forever, marry me, I'll love you 'til I die... that kind of thing. These locks were on a bridge in Verona, Italy, the home of Romeo and Juliet. Could there be a better way at a better spot to declare your love for someone then throw away (perhaps swallow?) the key? I'm curious to know, in my eagerness to make connections... where did it all start? Where does it end? How many locks of love have you come across in your travels? Have you ever left a lock somewhere? What did it say? And what on earth did you do with the key?

Our latest travel writing: in print and online

Aside from our new Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook hitting the shelves, we had a couple of articles appear on the web recently. Check out our "Off the beach in Crete" piece on the NineMSN Travel website. Yes, it is a Greek Island and it is summer, but there is life beyond the beach resorts and this is one island where we strongly believe that getting off the beaten track is more rewarding than staying on the well-trodden sand. Likewise, avoiding the throngs of tourists and thousands of groups that stream through Rome's Vatican Museums each day by doing a private after-hours tour is the only way I'd recommend you visit the museums and Sistine Chapel, having now done it both ways. Terry and I road-tested one of the private tours offered by Viator when we were in Rome a few months ago (as you know, we don't recommend or write about anything we haven't tried ourselves), and this is definitely the way to do it. You can read why I think so in my post for Viator, Why Lara loved her after-hours Vatican tour (sorry, not a very original title, I know), and also here in my own post. A few readers have asked where they can buy our books... well, if you don't have a good travel bookshop near you (or any bookshop for that matter, but travel bookshops are much more fun, aren't they?), you can always buy our guidebooks online from Amazon.com via my Cool Travel Guide Shop where I've compiled our titles. I haven't updated it in a while, so a couple of titles are missing, but I promise to do so soon. You can also go straight to Amazon or other online bookshops, but obviously if you buy a book here I get a little commission. The photo? A young Italian couple kissing among the columns at St. Peters, Rome.

Our Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook: the challenges of guidebook research and other considerations

Our research last year for the Syria chapter of our recently released Lonely Planet Syria and Lebanon guidebook required that we visit everything already in the book, along with many more sights that weren't in the guide. And while we loved visiting all of those "out of the way castles and ruins", when making decisions as to what to include and exclude in the manuscript we have to think about how much other readers might enjoy what may appear to be merely a pile of rubble to anyone but the most avid archaeological enthusiast. In some cases, the ruins of a castle may be rather spectacular (like the one pictured) and may well be worth the effort to get to. But most readers, who are staying in Syria for an average of five days, might not want to spend a long day travelling (or indeed several days) to get to the site, especially if the journey involves long waits between buses in the middle of nowhere and perhaps even a spot of hitchhiking to get there.

The other consideration we have is word count. We can't just keep adding sights to books, and therefore adding paragraphs and pages. In fact, for almost every book we ever worked on for Lonely Planet we were required to reduce rather than add new text. So, in order to add a few paragraphs to include some of those off-the-beaten-track places some readers would love us to include, we'd have to remove sights elsewhere. When it comes to making those decisions we have to ask ourselves whether we should cut a popular site that might be visited by thousands of travellers to include an out of the way castle that may get visited by only a few hundred people? And with a country like Syria (and, now, under the current political climate, also Lebanon), we have to give this serious thought. How many people are actually using our book and visiting these places? When we did our six week road trip around Syria we only bumped into around 20 other travellers. We were alone at most major sights.

It would be heavenly to write a book with an endless number of pages and complete freedom to include everything we wanted to. But it would also have to have a fee to match. And that's another interesting consideration. How many publishers are going to pay us to go to all those out-of-the-way sights that might only ever get visited by a few hundred travellers at most? Not Lonely Planet that's for sure. And probably not many other publishers either...