A travel guide to the world from the late 1990s

The glamour of being a travel writer? For me this meant writing a guide to the entire world from an office in Paddington.

This was the heady days of the dot.com boom/bust and whilst there seemed to be enough money for free vending machines, infinite numbers of site redesigns and people who would come in work to massage you whilst dressed as superheroes (this sounds like the drugs talking but is actually true) they couldn't afford to send me to any of the places on the travel guide.

I was pretty happy to be paid to write about travel and thought it may lead to further things so was fairly excited to launch this guide. Also I desperately needed the money.

The dot.com boom, by the way, wasn't all about having a teenage  boss wearing short and scootering round the office. A lot of it was about people not knowing what to do. The site on which it appeared, Bluecarrots.com (RIP),  was  a pointless and complex  shopping portal with a fiendishly complex customer loyalty scheme from which almost nobody benefited.

Inexperienced managers would bark orders they didn't fully understand at unimpressed coding teams (who used to be called the techies who still at that stage didn't always wash). The sales teams didn't know what they were selling and to whom - nothing to no-one it turned out. Happy days.

I was brought in because the editorial team were prone to 4,000 word libelous rants instead of focused and snappy features and sales copy, and with my newly minted journalism qualification I was seen as a safe yet cheap pair of hands. I wrote several hundred features for this lot, here's my guide to the world in the late 1990s.


http://web.archive.org/web/20010811143921/www.bluecarrots.com/travel/destinations.php

*thanks to the genius of WayBack  machine for keeping these old pages alive - I hope they never go under, what happens if they do?*