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Antigua was the capital of Guatemala until 1773, when the Santa Marta earthquake rocked the foundations of the town. Still, the city retains its colonial charm in the extravagant architecture of buildings, churches, convents and old residences, which offer more than a glimpse of past prosperity. Tourism is Antigua’s main income generator. With more than 60 language schools in a city of just over 30,000 people, it’s a popular destination for westerners to spend a few months studying Spanish amongst cobble-stoned streets and colourful neighbourhoods. In the evenings, locals and tourists alike arise from that fabulous Latin American tradition, the siesta, and head out to enjoy the wide range of local or international cuisine on offer. Not surprisingly, the dreaded Ronald McDonald plague has spread to Guatemala. However, Camperos, the local finger lickin’ chicken chain dominates, having sent Colonel Sanders and his army running for the border like…well like a pack of chooks with their heads cut off some time ago. Whatever your pleasure, once you’ve fuelled the belly, you can head on to a bar for a few local cervezas, or Samba the night away in one of the lively nightclubs. During the day, most of the action takes place around the Grand Plaza. Street vendors ply their trade as tour buses roll into the square. It’s a great place to sample the local food and world-renowned coffee in the outdoor cafes and restaurants, or simply hang out under shade in the park with the Antiguans. As you find in most developing countries, children are always at the ready to sell you some local textiles, a wood carving or jewellery, while displaying sales techniques that would put the best real estate shark to shame. Being a sucker for an angelic smile, it was useless trying to resist the charms of a little Mayan girl who promised me that my senorita would adore me if I bought her the lovely embroidery scarves her mother had made for us. At the other end of the bench, knee-high brother was smoothly working on senorita, telling her that she had the eyes of a goddess, and any man who did not adorn her with such a gift was not worthy of her. It was now three against one, so I handed over a wad of Quetzales to the grinning dynamic duo. It’s worth spending at least a day exploring Antigua’s colonial buildings and ruins. The most impressive examples being Catedral de Santiago, San Francisco, the town’s most notable church near Parque Central, and the former nunnery, Las Capuchinas. Looming over the city like a sleeping giant is the active volcano, Pacaya. For a few dollars you can take a guided hike up right to the rim of this 2500 metre chimneystack. Climbing a volcano is not so much a strenuous activity as a complicated one. After a two hour uphill trek through dense bushland and small mountainside villages, greeting passing bulls, cows and chickens as they head into town to do lunch, you find yourself staring up at the huge dark grey cone of Pacaya, and realise the hike has just begun. The combination of loose rubble, steep incline, and gale force wind provides excellent practice for your Latin dance moves…one step forward, two tumbles back. On a clear day, you can see right into bubbling, glowing cone. Unfortunately, we experienced fairly heavy cloud cover. Nonetheless, you get a great sense of fulfillment on reaching the peak. For anyone contemplating a trip to Guatemala, Antigua provides the perfect introduction with its wonderful assortment of Latin charms and spirited adventures. Take a peek at Guatemala. Simon Hillier is a freelance writer based in Sydney, Australia. His company, Get There Writing Services, provides copywriting, travel writing, feature articles, scripts and ebooks that will have your readers clicking and streaming for more. For further information on Simon’s article services, visit the feature articles and travel writing section of the Get There Writing Services website. Tags: Antigua, Get There, Guatemala, travel writing
Someone once said, “You don’t have to write something that is particularly good, just something people will buy to read.” I’ve often given that advice to those who email me asking how to get started writing. It is excellent advice. However, one thing that I have learned is that there is a consequence to following this advice. If people do not like what you’ve written, and they’ve shelled out money for it, they feel entitled to tell you off, big time. Upon occasion, they even go to the extent of threatening you physically. There was this woman from Albany, New York, who actually wrote a “reader’s review” (gross misnomer) on Amazon.com. She threatened to come to where I live in Mexico and “slap me.” See what you have to look forward to as a writer? Although it would be great to write something good that earns you a literary award as well as being something people buy, this is rarely the case. The buying part of writing far outweighs the fame when you are trying to pay the rent and buy food with the income you earn from your scribbling. Saleable writing today is more often a matter of promotion than good writing. You should try to do both. You should write well and sell what you write. However, the selling part is more often the pragmatic choice. There are a lot of writers who certainly are not literary geniuses but they consistently write what their readers want. Those are the ones who make money. Information is very valuable and people will pay dearly for it. If you want to eat, pay the rent, buy clothes for the kids, correctly promoting that print, eBook, or report makes the difference between success and failure. I had to learn this lesson quickly when we wrote and published our first book. When you are a “nobody” in the publishing world, you often have to settle with small, independent publishers who have absolutely no promotional budget for your book. Basically, they get it into the market. That’s all. If you want people to buy your book, so you can get that new pair of pants, you have to be the one to promote it. Quickly, you have to figure the ins and outs of book promotion. It is riding on your shoulders and no one else’s. If you do not shamelessly promote yourself, trust me, no one else will do it for you. The immediate painful reality is that you will never, as a sole individual, have access to the distribution channels that big name publishers have. So, unless you are wealthy, you have to choose one or two of the venues you can realistically afford to tackle and go like gangbusters. If you can afford it, you could hire a private publicity firm to do what a big name publisher would do. But, because few of us can afford to do this, we have to think creatively. Because I write non-fiction, I was able to find scores of tight-niche websites that were thematically related to my book. I wrote a book on relocating to Mexico as an American expatriate. Can you even begin to imagine the websites out there related to my book? It is a goldmine. Consequently, with small text ads, I have been doing rather well in sales on Amazon.com and am consistently in the top ten of my book’s genre. I also found related sites where I could post a thumbnail picture of our book’s cover, a description, and a link back to Amazon.com. These cost very little money. One lady posted my ad in exchange for ebook versions of two of my books. So, you can barter for advertising if you have something of value to offer. You can offer to write an article or two for someone struggling to find content for his fledging website. You must insist you will write the article for FREE if the website owner will post a link back to your book. You can also tell them, as an incentive for a permanent link, that they can earn a commission on sales of your book if they sign upand it’s freewith Amazon.com’s Associate Program. I am on many thematically related websites because I suggested this. The website owner gets a commission; you get free advertising, and everyone wins. Something that really is grossly underestimated is writing free articles with a bio or “resource box” at the end of the article with your book’s info in it. I write for FREE for several online magazines that post my books, their website links, and my bio. They, in turn, get my content. I get free advertising and free exposure. I am convinced that most, if not all, of our book sales come from doing this little-known method of book promotion. Press releases, targeted ads, link exchanges, writing FREE articles in exchange for posting your book at the end of the article, are all ways to promote your book when all you have is yourself as your publicity agent. 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Straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, Istanbul’s strategic location has made it a cultural crossroads beyond compare. Its geographical position alone seems to have made it destined to be the capital of a mighty empire. In fact it was the epicentre of two great but very different empires, the Byzantine and Ottoman, for some 1,700 years. Yet even before it ascended the imperial throne it shone as a dynamic vibrant city for almost a thousand years, from the moment it was first founded as the Greek town of Byzantium. It’s hard not to speak in superlatives when describing this epic cradle of civilisation. No other city in the world has been besieged so many times, so greatly was it coveted by peoples outside its walls. No other city on earth sits astride two continents. Not just age old, for centuries it was the most multicultural city in Europe, on whose streets more than a dozen languages were spoken, from Italian to Persian, Greek to Arabic. Above all it was a city made for trade, built for business. “Jews, Turks and Christians several Tenets hold. Established on a triangular spit of land (the area today dominated by the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofya), the original town was surrounded by water on three sides. This was no shy retiring little colony, but a confident centre of commerce designed to govern one of the most significant waterways in the world, the Bosphorus. Control of this narrow channel connecting the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ensured political clout, a constant stream of innovative ideas, and of course money, in the shape of traffic and taxes. Sailing on the Bosphorus today affords a perfect opportunity to look at the city as sailors would have seen it centuries ago, its seven hills bejewelled with the most splendid mosques. Daily boat trips stop at a number of points along its length, like Anadolu Kavagi almost at the entrance to the Black Sea. Here you can leave the ferry, eat at one of the fish restaurants by the shore, and wander up to the ruined castle for breathtaking views and a leap of imagination back to the time when Jason was sailing below in search of the Golden Fleece. Nowadays oil tankers jostle with passenger ferries on the waters of the Bosphorus, but their numbers are but a tiny fraction of the ships that used to flock to Constantinople. In Ottoman days fifteen thousand small boats worked in the harbour, obscuring its very waters. Frenetic it may have been but disorganised it certainly wasn’t. When it came to money, the city was a strict and disciplined governess. In the Golden Horn, the capital’s sheltered and superb deep water harbour, boats moored directly by the shore to unload, and their cargoes were carefully inspected by a waiting army of customs officials that calculated their payable duty. When the Byzantine Empire and the shattered city of Constantinople finally fell to Mehmet the Conqueror and his Ottoman army in 1453, shockwaves reverberated throughout Western Europe and the whole Christian world. Yet Mehmet was a visionary. Just as Constantine had done over a millennium earlier, refounding Byzantium as his new capital, a new Rome, Mehmet was determined to restore the city’s fortunes and place it on an even higher pedestal. He issued a rallying call for people of all races and religions to come and live and work in the city. It was an open door policy based on tolerance and freedom designed to invite skills, creativity, and energy. As a 15th century pasha advised the Sultan, trade would set Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire on the road to success: “Look with favour on the merchants in the land; always care for them; let no one harass them for through their trading the land becomes prosperous and by their wares cheapness abound in the world; through them the excellent fame of the Sultan is carried to surrounding lands and by them the wealth within the land is increased.” Within a few decades a whole host of foreign firms had stepped over the welcome mat and set up shop. Many of these businesses operated out of the covered bazaar built by Mehmet the Conqueror, which still stands at the very heart of the Grand bazaar in Istanbul. You can still sense something of the sights, smells, and sounds of what old Constantinople must have been like if you take some time to explore this labyrinthine city within a city. Down the slope to the Spice Bazaar the lanes are crammed with tiny shops and workshops full of artisans banging out their respective trades. They give a small hint of the cornucopia of goods that once came to the imperial capital, from every corner of the globe. For centuries the Ottoman Empire was the middleman of the world, its famed merchants uniting three continents - Europe, Africa, and Asia, as far east as China. The bounty of the world didn’t arrive only by sea. All roads led to Constantinople. Caravans of camels and mules up to 2,000 strong arrived every month converging from all points of the horizon - Poland to Arabia, France to Persia. Constantinople had been a magnet for both goods and people long before the Turks arrived. A regular stopping place for Christian pilgrims on the way to Jerusalem, once the Byzantine emperor Justinian built the Haghia Sophia in the 6th century, the capital itself became a site of pilgrimage and a top tourist destination. The Haghia Sophia wasn’t any old place of worship, it was the greatest church in Christendom for almost a thousand years. Converted to a mosque by Mehmet the Conqueror, today it stands as a breathtaking museum open to people of all faiths. All around the Aya Sofya are solid reminders of the city’s longevity and its glorious past. A few hundred metres to the north is Topkapi Palace, where the Ottoman sultans lived and governed in opulent splendour. A few hundred metres to the south is the Blue Mosque, whose slender minarets define the city’s skyline. Beside that is the old Roman hippodrome, garnished with an Egyptian obelisk. Walking around Istanbul it’s hard to imagine another city that can rival it as an open air museum. Yet this is no ghost town, no dyed in the wool city trading on old memories. Following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, its renaming as Istanbul and its demotion from capital city, the old city is once again on the rise. Although Ankara is now the political capital of Turkey, situated at the country’s geographic heart, Istanbul dwarves it in population, and also in vibrancy. Adorned with some of the finest architectural and artistic wonders in the world, and with an extraordinary historic legacy on every street corner, Istanbul remains Turkey’s real social, artistic, and commercial hub, brimming with vitality and activity. Growing at an exponential rate, from 3 million in 1970 to a behemoth with some 11 million inhabitants today, the city continues to be the ultimate cultural crossroads. Its lure and pull are stronger than ever - for a great many people its streets still appear paved with gold. copyright Peter Sommer 2006 Peter runs a specialist travel company, Peter Sommer Travels http://www.petersommer.com, offering archaeological tours, cruises, and gulet charters http://www.petersommer.com/gulet_charters_turkey.html in Turkey. In 1994 he walked 2,000 miles retracing Alexander the Great’s route across Turkey and fell in love with the country and its people. An archaeologist and documentary producer he has worked on many acclaimed BBC/PBS/CNN TV series including In the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and Tales from the Green Valley, about life on a Welsh farm in the year 1620, which was shown to rave reviews on BBC2 in the UK in 2005. He has had travel articles published in newspapers incl. The Times (UK), The Brisbane Sunday Mail & The South China Morning Post, and in various magazines. He is a member of the Outdoor Writers’ Guild, the UK’s best established guild of professional outdoor & travel writers. You can read a range of his articles at http://www.petersommer.com/writing_index.html email Peter at info@petersommer.com or Tel +44 (0)1600 861 929 Tags: Byza, Byzantium, Constantinople, culture, history, Istanbul, Ottoman, travel, travel writing, Turkey
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