 coming soon: our guide to Coyoacán, México City Although I had already shown a little preview of our first photo shoot in Coyoacán, here is another teaser. One of the reasons I’ve delayed the posting of the final photos is because we were very fortunate to gain access to a museum in the area that will give this guide a very distinct visual identity. Our crew was back in this neighbourhood just a few days ago and soon you’ll be able to enjoy a very unique journey through one of the most serene areas of Mexico City.
I can’t believe we’re already halfway through October. It’s been a while since my last photo post on a Saturday. Hope you enjoy it.
About five months ago I wrote the post “startup and the simple life” committing myself to bring some ideas, concepts, business plans and even a moderate budget on my next vacation.
My family and I have been in Mexico for the last four weeks, an unusually long vacation for us. Aside from some important family time in key moments of our lives, we’ve had the opportunity to visit this great country at what has clearly been its lowest point as a tourist destination in a very long time. The result has been a magnificent journey that has taken us from the essential beach destination to the magnificent and desolated landscapes of its mountain ranges, to remote and forgotten ghost towns in the process of being re-conquered by entrepreneurial ‘gringos’, to the most glamorous wilderness experiences.
But I also devoted time to put in motion a small idea that in less than four weeks has taken a live of its own and now has a chance to become a worthy enterprise, something I’ve started calling the Global Culture Tour. Here is the account of that little project.
The Global Culture Tour is a collective creative experiment to document special neighbourhoods around the world. Places that have found a way to balance the many attributes that I often write about in the blog. Our tag line is “Sustainable, Memorable, Livable travel experiences for global citizens”, so that should start giving you an idea of what destinations may qualify. It’s objective is to create an online guide that helps discerning travellers find ways to immerse themselves into these areas. Hyper-local by nature, these guides feature a destination using a strong editorial approach with a solid and coherent narrative, while showcasing beautiful, original photography that could be the envy of any other travel guide.
In the months preceding my trip, I started shaping the idea through a number of posts such as “reinventing tourism in mexico“, “I could live here” , “give up your urban devil“, “meaningful experiences“, “the quest for liveability” and “the greatest destination“. Feedback on these posts helped tremendously to orient the project and understand which areas generated the most interest. Clearly there was something appealing. One of the first things I did once the journey started was to organize the various ideas throughout these posts into a single Creative Brief that could be used to present to any person I would talk to. This was important as it helped me focus the project and helped me persuade people that I was serious about it.
Sustainable, Memorable, Livable travel experiences for global citizens:
Global Culture enables memorable travel experiences through the continuous exploration of regions that provide a culturally rich environment for the urbanite on a livability quest.
Such was the tag line of the Creative Brief and immediately became the tag line of this blog as well. A friend of mine had taken some of the key ideas and created a mood-board, sort of a visual guide for what we were trying to convey:
 Mood Board There were other discussions about the technical aspects of the project, but to be honest those were the simple ones. The very next day I arrived in Mexico City started listening to the Twitter conversation about Coyoacán (the place I had decided to feature) and photographers. It didn’t take long before I ran into a photographer featured in Flickr with several “interesting” photos of the area. Needless to say he jumped at the opportunity to meet to discuss the project. And with the amount of preparation I had done there was an immediate alignment of the minds. He even coined the term “Coyoacán Chronicles”. A week into my trip, I knew this was going to happen.
During those first days I also did a few walk-around photo-shoots to scout the area for interesting places to feature in our guide. I knew very little about pre-production, release forms, permits, etc. But asking people was enough to get up to speed. One of the first important shifts in the project happened after these scouting sessions. It was obvious the amount of preparation to do the photo-shoot in a single weekend was too much, almost impossible to arrange. I bet that’s why you see the large film crews parking on location for several days. We knew the effort would have to be spread over several weeks, managing to produce a few “scenes” each time. This was by no means a problem, because the plan was to publish this in some sort of a blog format. All we needed was to serialize the photo-shoots at the same pace that we would publish them. I was feeling a TV producer at this point.
Soon it became obvious that finding the right photographer was likely the most important accomplishment. Not only was he ready to shoot, but he used his own local contacts to recruit the other person in the team: a writer. Around this time we had a good idea of which locations we wanted to shoot, a time frame, the general structure of the posts, etc. I was puzzled by only one small problem: we couldn’t find any kind of accommodation in the area. Any serious travel guide would have to offer at least one good option and we didn’t have any.
Although many travel sites list several hotels in this area of the city, many of them are wrongly geolocated due to some duplicate street names. From a long list of possible hotels, we ended up finding only two that really were within the boundaries of our photo-shoot. Luckily one of them (La Cuija) was exactly the type of small hotel that we were looking for. Once we had debunked this mistery, we had almost everything under control. Almost.
I had decided to hire a professional model to aid during the photo-shoot to create lively scenes that would stand out when compared to the typical shot you find in travel guides. I had plenty of leads and referrals but couldn’t get any one of them to commit in the short time frame we had. One day, walking around the city, I ran into an old friend of mine and quickly gave him an account of the project. He was quick to offer some help as he had some connections in the show business. Two days later the casting call was answered and we found not a model, but an actress. That happened yesterday.
Tomorrow is my last day in the city and we are doing our first full photo-shoot. Just in time. In the next few days, I’ll post some of the first results from this project and will explain where this is going.
Thanks to all the conversations that have made this possible. A revamped Global Culture site gets closer to reality as we get a first draft of our new Creative Brief and start to move content around to give it a purpose.
Here is are some relevant fragments from the document:
Global Culture enables memorable experiences through the continuous exploration of regions that provide a culturally rich environment for the urbanite on a livability quest.
What started as a blog about Global Culture and its actors has evolved into a source of great travel experiences.
Sustainable
There is a new generation of discerning travelers that have already seen the world and are aware of the myriad of frivolous options that plague the industry. They are looking for meaning in every opportunity they have to interact with the world and want to make sure they leave the best of themselves at each destination.
Memorable
An experience will have a lasting impact if it proves to be unique and authentic. But its discovery starts way ahead of the trip and requires the traveler to get acquainted with the story of a destination, using for that purpose any means of interaction available.
Livable
In opposition to mass-tourism and its obsession with packaging chosen moments, a Global Culture experience should not feel like a temporary adventure but a continuation of your quest to find a better way to live, immersing yourself into foreign cultures with the sole ideal of figuring out which aspects of life their people have mastered.
Via Stephen Joyce and his T4 blog (Travel & Tourism Technology Trends) I found a brief but great summary of what constitutes a meaningful experience. It comes from the people at the Lapland Centre of Expertise for the Experience Industry in Finland.
But before I repost an abstract of their model it is worth revisiting where this quest comes from: in give up your urban “devil” I suggest that some sort of experimentation is needed for the global citizen to learn of other life-styles… experimentation as in trying various ‘experiences’.
Here is a list of the elements of meaningful experiences and how I see them applied to the notion of exploring global cultures:
- Individuality: how unique and extraordinary a product is. One of the key drivers to explore a Global Culture is the realization that unless we are careful to orchestrate our life-styles according to the highest standards, it is too easy to fall into the common place that groups the majority of people living in large urban centres. The quest to learn about how other people (usually small, unique groups) are finding better ways to conduct their lives without giving up important advances in society/culture/technology is what motivates many global citizens to keep moving.
- Authenticity: reflects the existing lifestyle and culture of the region. In direct opposition to a staged experience, the discerning traveller is often frustrated by elements revealing the orchestration behind the scenes. A daring traveller will often prefer to struggle a little to figure things out and ‘get’ an authentic treatment from the locals than be given a show devoid of challenges, digested for the faint of heart.
- Story: A credible and authentic story gives the product a social significance and content. I’ve recently started to discuss the fact that the best way to engage potential travellers into an experience is by immersing them into the ongoing story, narrated with all the artifacts of modern technologies (blogs, videos, photos, locals tweeting, etc). The more a person is exposed to the real thing before travel time, the more likely the experience will render the personal transformation expected instead of becoming a collection of awkward, unforeseen circumstances that kill spontaneity.
- Multi-sensory perception: see my previous post on memorable experiences.
- Contrast: means how different the experience is from the customer’s everyday life. In the context of immersing yourself into another culture, the degree of contrast may play against you. After all, you’re trying to decide if you could live this life. If everything was too different to what you’re used to, chances are you won’t want it. However, it is safe to assume that the ideal life-style you’re looking for must be different to the one you have today, otherwise why would you had started the quest in the first place.
- Interaction: I’m convinced that an important element in creating these experiences is the possibility of maintaining your usual connections with your professional realm. This is important because we’re seeing how much we can change your context and maintain that thing that makes you valuable to society… then applying that to your new context.
The T4 blog is all about a technology that helps small, independent tour operators to embrace the same technologies that other larger entities have without incurring in the burden of implementing it. I believe many of the same concepts and much of the technology can be leveraged to create far more complex experiences that span several suppliers. Ultimately we are trying to give people access to many of the elements that would create an entire life-style for a specific period of time in order to give them a shot at
becoming global citizens.
When I wrote startup and the simple life a couple of months ago I set in motion a plan that would take me to a rural setting with the idea to create productive business relationships with locals hoping to capitalize on some of the ideas of this blog. Mostly on the idea that we urbanites treasure the calmness that can only be acquired through detachment from our ever accelerating way of live.
It is perhaps a sign that Monocle’s #24 romanticizes the idea of agro as a fundamental human activity that would restore the soul or our society by getting closer to the people that make a living from farming. While the same formula is often cited by advocates of organic produce, Monocle’s article seems to be more focused on the art of living a simple life and be productive at the same time. I say it must be a sign because just a few days ago I was using the concept of agro-tourism (as developed in Italy) as a prime example of how people seek to immerse themselves into a lifestyle that seems to be disappearing as urban centres advance.
I too, while trying to refine this idea, assumed that if we could send a few people over to the rural landscape, the environment would work its magic, their soul would be cleansed and they would have the experience of their life. But something seems to be missing from this assumption.
If you’ve spent a week at a villa/farm in Europe, sipping a cup of coffee while watching the men and women of the town work the fields and bring fresh produce to the table, only to spend three hours on a slow-food feast, proud of how in touch with humanity you are, you’ve got to realize you’re still an spectator and the whole experience is a bit foreign. Yes, maybe they invited you pick your own fruit from the tree, but would you consider trading your current lifestyle for this? Would you work the fields from dawn to dusk to have a quiet evening and a light dinner?
This tension between our urban self and our “gaia” consciousness is a complex one and has developed already many traumas on simple people trying to do the right thing. It may be tempting to give up our urban “devil” and enlist in some new form of commune. But for most of us that experience will not last.
As with many other problems, the key may be in experimentation: what if you could try alternate lifestyles for a short while? Maybe farming is not going to cut it, but helping a community in need develop advanced social programs tapping into your urban skills may be your call. If you could try not one but a few life-changing experiences, chances are not only you’ll change your life, but you’ll end up enhancing the life of many people around you.
You can only become a global citizen by living like other citizens around the globe.
Thanks to my friends at PlanetEye for the tools and the Mexico Tourism Board for the images, I was able to organize a collection of images depicting interesting regions that may not be as popular as the beaches. Again, just to make the point that tourism promotion is usually biased to send people on charters to the beaches, but there is far more depth to this and any country. At a time when everyone in the industry is wondering how to restore the glorious days, this is only one idea that deserves attention.
For best results, use the zoom controls (+/-) to get closer on the map and click on the markers to preview the images within that area. This is a very cool widget that will continue to be updated as I keep adding photos to the collection.
If you’ve been to Cancun, Vallarta, Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Acapulco, Mazatlan or Huatulco chances are you don’t know Mexico. Yes, you’ve enjoyed the privileged beaches, the top-notch hotels, a first-class experience and you fell in love with these places and the people that live in them. But you are probably missing the best part. As Manuel was saying a few days ago: “I dare you to find Holbox”. In reinventing tourism in mexico, I implied that all these beach destinations are going to have a really difficult time getting back on track:
Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them and will have no problem in evaluating their loyalties.
But because of the “celebrity” status of these destinations, people tend to stop looking further or deeper into Mexico. And there is a lot of Mexico that you should know about.
A few days ago I did a short road-trip to a little town called Papalotla, not to far from Mexico City, but distant enough that you can enjoy the traditional country life style so characteristic of the region: horses, “charros”, “toreros”, “haciendas”. While I’m a frequent visitor to the area, I was pleasantly surprised that for the first time the road was paved, literally, all the way to the town. I was told that many of the little towns in the Central Valley were getting the same treatment. Now, that is some important signal. Certainly, infrastructure spending is in vogue these days, but maybe this effort is also the response of a visionary government agency that understands that road infrastructure was one of the bottlenecks to further develop regional tourism in Mexico (as reported by The Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Report 2009, page 273).
While “cultural tourism” may not be for everyone, I’m convinced the abundance of heritage destinations throughout the country could, one day, represent an important percentage of tourism receipts. Not only by targeting a different kind of tourist, but also by getting them closer to the people that enable the experiences. Without travel agents, global hotel franchises, charter operators and so on, the money spent on these types of trips is likely to help the people that live there.
So where is this unknown Mexico I’m talking about? Well, if you’re going to find it, I better put together a really good map. Luckily I know a couple of people that are very good at this. A few places that should be in the list: Taxco, Dolores Hidalgo, Janitzio, Tapalpa, Teotitlan del Valle, Bernal.
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