I hate travel blogs, HATE THEM.
The vast majority are specifically designed to;
a. brag about being on holiday/ traveling (holidaying for the middle class)
b. talk utter shite about ‘spiritial journeys and ‘experiencing’ other cultures.
c. Constantly stating about how we don’t appreciate what we have and how lucky we are – if you can afford to piss off round the world rather than working like a slave like decent folk then I suppose you are lucky and probably a cunt.
Reading about other people visiting exotic locations is fundamentally boring, and only mildly interesting if you happen to personally know the person. That’s why 99.6% of travel blogs are exceptional dull. So the challenge is, as I see it, is to make a travel blog both interesting and amusing, rather than what most travel blogs are, dull and cuntish.
Which nicely brings me to announce the latest incarnation of Angry Chimp – Angry Chimp: Your basic travel blog
What what?
I shall be departing these shores with my girlfriend in just over 2 short months time for South East Asia, a rite of passage for all white middle class lazy bastards.
Our simple aim is to spend as much time as possible traveling around and having a really easy time of it. We will try to visit as many countries in SE Asia as possible; although we may decide to give Myanmar a miss (but I do hear Burma is nice this time of year).
This travel blog will be an unflinching account of my travels as we journey on a shoestring (a relative shoestring, we’re a long time past our gap years, although I am technically on a gap year - a gap year from any responsibility or progression of my so-called career).
When I first kicked this blog off way back in 2005 I set some rules (which I don’t know if I ever stuck to) so it seems appropriate to refresh these rules for this new incarnation.
Rules of this travel blog –
1. For each destination visited I will restrict my use of the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ to only one occurrence each, e.g,
“It was a beautiful morning when I saw the amazing sight of a ship load of scary Somalian pirates approaching our freighter at an horrific rate of knots”
or
“As we departed Portsmouth, a small southern costal town in England I considered it to be neither amazing nor beautiful, but rather a bit of a shit hole”
2. The only growth I will experience whilst abroad will be my waistline through stuffing my gob with tons of top, cheap foreign nosh. Or from an infection of some sort.
3. During my time in southeast asia I will not remark about the generosity or gentle spirits of the locals or indeed anything that can be considered to be patronizing or vaguely racist. You can not define an entire race of people by the very few you may meet – if this were true visitors of the new Mayor of London would believe us all to be stooped and privileged, floppy brained, deceitful, shallow twats. Personally I am neither privileged, nor stooped.
4. There will not be photo upon photo of impossibly beautiful golden beaches that look as close to paradise as it is possible to get… actually this is untrue, hopefully I’m going to stuff the blog full of them.
5. I will never use the terms ‘off the beaten track’ or ‘unspoiled natural beauty’.
6. I will only write about places I actually visit. Again, I know this is not a hard and fast rule for many travel blog writers.
7. If/ when I visit Thailand, I will not proceed to tell an ‘amusing’ story about visiting a Thai bar where a local of indeterminate gender chatted me up with a view to selling sex. This is THE MOST CLICHED STORY EVER in travel writing!
a. brag about being on holiday/ traveling (holidaying for the middle class)
b. talk utter shite about ‘spiritial journeys and ‘experiencing’ other cultures.
c. Constantly stating about how we don’t appreciate what we have and how lucky we are – if you can afford to piss off round the world rather than working like a slave like decent folk then I suppose you are lucky and probably a cunt.
Reading about other people visiting exotic locations is fundamentally boring, and only mildly interesting if you happen to personally know the person. That’s why 99.6% of travel blogs are exceptional dull. So the challenge is, as I see it, is to make a travel blog both interesting and amusing, rather than what most travel blogs are, dull and cuntish.
Which nicely brings me to announce the latest incarnation of Angry Chimp – Angry Chimp: Your basic travel blog
What what?
I shall be departing these shores with my girlfriend in just over 2 short months time for South East Asia, a rite of passage for all white middle class lazy bastards.
Our simple aim is to spend as much time as possible traveling around and having a really easy time of it. We will try to visit as many countries in SE Asia as possible; although we may decide to give Myanmar a miss (but I do hear Burma is nice this time of year).
This travel blog will be an unflinching account of my travels as we journey on a shoestring (a relative shoestring, we’re a long time past our gap years, although I am technically on a gap year - a gap year from any responsibility or progression of my so-called career).
When I first kicked this blog off way back in 2005 I set some rules (which I don’t know if I ever stuck to) so it seems appropriate to refresh these rules for this new incarnation.
Rules of this travel blog –
1. For each destination visited I will restrict my use of the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘amazing’ to only one occurrence each, e.g,
“It was a beautiful morning when I saw the amazing sight of a ship load of scary Somalian pirates approaching our freighter at an horrific rate of knots”
or
“As we departed Portsmouth, a small southern costal town in England I considered it to be neither amazing nor beautiful, but rather a bit of a shit hole”
2. The only growth I will experience whilst abroad will be my waistline through stuffing my gob with tons of top, cheap foreign nosh. Or from an infection of some sort.
3. During my time in southeast asia I will not remark about the generosity or gentle spirits of the locals or indeed anything that can be considered to be patronizing or vaguely racist. You can not define an entire race of people by the very few you may meet – if this were true visitors of the new Mayor of London would believe us all to be stooped and privileged, floppy brained, deceitful, shallow twats. Personally I am neither privileged, nor stooped.
4. There will not be photo upon photo of impossibly beautiful golden beaches that look as close to paradise as it is possible to get… actually this is untrue, hopefully I’m going to stuff the blog full of them.
5. I will never use the terms ‘off the beaten track’ or ‘unspoiled natural beauty’.
6. I will only write about places I actually visit. Again, I know this is not a hard and fast rule for many travel blog writers.
7. If/ when I visit Thailand, I will not proceed to tell an ‘amusing’ story about visiting a Thai bar where a local of indeterminate gender chatted me up with a view to selling sex. This is THE MOST CLICHED STORY EVER in travel writing!
If I happen to be approached by any indeterminate gender local with a view to exchanging bam bam for wam wam I will simply have sex with them and be done with it.
I'm joking of course .
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