That's Rough

I have attacked the anti-travel, anti-human environmental lobby on this blog before, but it has to be said that while their motives maybe sinister and their means illiberal, the environmentalists do at least have convictions, which they firmly believe in: human beings are evil and the planet must come first. Right or wrong, that's their opinion and few would deny their right to it (even though climate-change deniers such as myself would be the first up against the wall in a world led by them...)

Last week however the budget airlines that attract so much wrath from the environmentalists were attacked from another angle: the travel industry. Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guides series, called for an end to 'binge flying' and for 'green levies to be placed on overseas plane trips.'

Ellingham wants no less than a £100 green tax on all European flights, and a £200 tax on long-haul flights. He said "If there was just one thing I could change it would be to stop this new British obsession with binge flying. We now live in a society where, if people have nothing to do on a Saturday night, they fly to Budapest for 48 hours."

The devil is in the last sentence. Ellingham's worries may on the surface be about saving the environment, but they also betray a disdain for the kind of people who fly to Budapest for 48 hours. This middle-class student, backpacker travel snobbism, which turns its nose up at people who go abroad and - shock horror - stay in nice chain hotels, drink imported beer, eat in McDonalds and generally neglect the culture of the places they visit, is fashionable in travel writer circles.

Well, not at In Your Pocket. We think that any society that is egalitarian enough to facilitate almost anybody access to cheap air travel is a successful one. That people can quite literally go to Budapest if they have nothing to do is wonderful. Quite how stopping people doing so would make the world a better place is difficult to comprehend.

It seems doubly ironic that the people of Central and Eastern Europe - discovering cheap travel after decades locked behind the Iron Curtain - are now taking part in an activity that some very comfortable people in Western Europe consider beyond contempt.

Keep flying.

Keep offsetting the offsets.

Coincidences

It is said that imitation is a form of flattery, so we at In Your Pocket have become somewhat philosophical about the ever-increasing number of lesser companies who blatantly steal and re-use our content. The internet - as wonderful as it is - has made it so easy for people to copy and paste our reviews, features and even contact details (complete with mistakes, usually) that is difficult to keep track of them all.

Fortunately there are now tools available to publishers that make finding the culprits just as easy, and with a good legal team behind us we can in most cases nip any copyright theft in the bud before it becomes a serious problem.

In the past we have successfully taken action against a number of publishers, from Mickey Mouse outfits such as Bucharest Cream of the Crop (a guide to the Romanian capital whose very name was stolen from our guides!) to major international publishers such as Le Petit Fute (one of whose writers back in 1999 stole vast swathes of text from one of our guides).

Less easy are dealing with the 'moral thieves,' who are clever enough to rewrite the content they steal in order to prevent legal action. Such moral theft is common in the travel publishing industry, where armchair travel writers abound. Many of us old timers long for the pre-internet days, when being a travel writer meant actually having to do some traveling.

Now, putting to one side all talk of plagiarism and moral theft, I would like to bring to your attention some coincidences.

A travel-publishing start-up, Fastcheck Arrival Guides, recently began offering PDF guides for download on the internet. We were flattered, having been the first company to offer such guides, back in 2000.

Browsing a couple of the Arrival Guides, and being familiar with our own content, I was amazed by the coincidences that occur. For example, the Arrival Guide review of Deja-vu, a popular cocktail bar in Bucharest, reads:

"Order Deja-vu's most exotic cocktail to make the most of the extensive drinks menu. If you're feeling risque a Russian barmaid will obligingly squeeze lemon into your mouth with her teeth, to accompany whichever concoction you choose."

The Bucharest In Your Pocket review of Deja-vu reads:

"Not a place for a quiet night out. This is the best cocktail bar in Bucharest, with the best bar staff this side of the River Prut. They serve a few cocktails here involving fire, as well as a few which involve wearing a World War II Russian army helmet. They also serve at least one which involves a young Russian girl squeezing lemon into your mouth with her teeth. At weekends it is packed and the small dancefloor is the sweatiest place in Bucharest. The music is as bizarre but enjoyable as the drinks."

What makes this such a coincidence is that the 'Russian' girl in question is not actually Russian - the reviewer from Bucharest In Your Pocket made a mistake. It really is incredible that the Arrival Guides reviewer made the same mistake! Still, innocent coincidences do happen...

Take a look at the Arrival Guides write-up for the Bucharest metro:

"Bucharest's metro has four lines and 45 stations..."

A previous (now corrected) entry for the Bucharest metro in Bucharest In Your Pocket also claimed that:

"The metro now has four lines and 45 stations..."

What is incredible here is that the Bucharest metro has 39 stations... What a coincidence! Both the Bucharest In Your Pocket writer and the Arrival Guides writer have similar arithmetic issues, miscounting 39 as 45. Really quite spooky.

Oh, here's another one.

Arrival Guides:

"Bucharest's Triumphal Arch remembers Romania's Great War and its reunification in 1918."

Bucharest In Your Pocket:

"Raised in 1922 to commemorate Romania's Great War dead..."

What's strange about this is that only Britons use the phrase Great War, and on the evidence of the rest of the guide, the Arrival Guide to Bucharest was not written by a Briton.

I could go on. Arrival Guides are full of such crazy little coincidences.

Coincidences. Nothing more, nothing less, and I would never suggest otherwise.

Keep checking back for more.