From the Editor: The best from myWanderlust this week

Lyn Hughes says Love is all You Need

5 mins

What happens? I go away to bucolic Sussex for a few days, away from Wi-Fi (the cottage was supposed to have it, but hadn’t), thinking all was well with the world, and then come back to unrest bigger than that outside St Paul’s.

Not that you’d know it if you popped in on Just Back From. I hadn’t been the only one enjoying rural England. DrG was Just Back From Sussex too, waxing lyrical about autumnal sunshine and toiling farmers on the South Downs, and recommending some lovely walks … and pubs. In case anyone is wondering what has happened to the Wanderlust known for reporting from the frontline, well satkinson has been to Spain, sararevell to Germany, and I was in Arundel, West Sussex. All sound wonderful, but it was down to Mik to report back from Sri Lanka and keep our cutting-edge reputation intact.

Talking of Sri Lanka, the winner of our World Guide Awards was a lovely chap called Bruno, a Tamil from a tea-picking family who has turned himself into one of the best tour guides in the world, praised for his modesty, his caring nature, and honesty. So, what a shame that someone out there has taken exception to Wanderlust ‘promoting’ Sri Lanka and is barraging me with emails, books about Nazi Germany and general abuse. Sergeant Pluck, I need you!

I thought choosing a Photo of the Week would prove a lot less contentious, but how wrong could I be. A photo of the pyramids of Giza had already attracted a lot of comment. Put up by someone new to the site (Google reveals him to be a pro fashion photographer), it is very clearly manipulated. It would certainly not get anywhere in the Wanderlust Photo of the Year Competition where we state that a photo should “capture the moment, not create it”. However, one can’t deny it is a striking image. And so, we made it the Photo of the Week, but gosh that got the comments posts and forum really going.

Fortunately, some quirky pics by new member digestevebiscuit err, really take the biscuit. No photoshop-ing involved just honest-to-goodness weirdness to keep us captivated. Meanwhile, there were plenty of other fine pics around, including Flydime giving us a peek at Istanbul, satkinson transporting us to the Picos de Europa, DavidHigham bewitching us in the Sahara, and vkhaitan celebrating Diwali with us.

The Experiences section threw up some lovely reads too from the FTs: Fintown Trekker has produced a superb guide to Budapest, while Fiona Trowbridge enlightened us all on posh camping (a wood-burning stove inside the tent! Umm, what about health and safety?). Oodles of other good stuff in there too. It’s no wonder that the site is getting a record number of visitors – around 100,000 a month!

So it was sad that World War 3 broke out on the forum when someone under the name ‘pseudonym’ complained about the sniping of some contributors to the site, and pleaded “If you've nothing nice to say then don't say anything” This is turn got everyone excited, with mixed comments, including a certain amount of, ahem, sniping at poor pseudonym. In the end calamine2808 exhorts: “please, please, please can the meek and mild, kind and considerate come out their shells and help restore harmony to this lovely site”

Hear, hear! Let’s all go and have a pint of Harvey’s in the South Downs.

Or let’s just try and spread a bit of love and peace amongst our online travel buddies, old and new.

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