For better or worse there aren’t many countries in the world where that’s even possible.

That’s my pet theory, anyway.

This has lots of parallels to the Aga Khan-funded Al-Azhar Park project in Cario, in terms of how much it benefits the community. When I first visited, it really seemed like a gross elitist resort, but on this last visit it looked like it has integrated a lot better with the community at the edge, and I think the success of the park helped push other major fixes elsewhere in the medieval city (though it’s not like the government really did it–I think it’s all been with foreign funding).

The sinkholes are a troubling phenomenon indeed, and to advance a major development program without first taking concrete actions to stabilize both the water level and the shoreline is, as you say, quite mad. The geological process behind the sinkholes is interesting: As the northern basin of the sea continues to drop precipitously, less saline water intrudes into the shore areas and simply dissolves them from underneath — not surprisingly, they are composed largely of salt.

At Ein Bokek the situation is completely different: Not only do the shallow evaporation ponds stand in their entirety many metres above the level of the northern basin, but their water level is constantly RISING. This is so counter-intuitive that when it was explained to us in our guide course I found it quite intriguing!

Here’s how it works: Over the several decades of mineral extraction, untold tons of unwanted compounds have also precipitated out and accumulated on the floor of the shallow pools. In short, the pools fill up with residue at quite a rapid rate. So, In order to maintain pools with a certain depth of water, ever-higher dikes or berms (of salt!) are required. The entire installation, then, is rising in elevation over time — the floor of the pool, the surface of the water, and the enclosing dikes — until today the water feeding the pools is pumped UP, I believe 15 or 20 metres in elevation, from the northern basin of the Dead Sea.

You can see the implications for the Ein Bokek tourism infrastructure. The steadily rising water levels are already encroaching upon the hotels and endangering their foundations. Indeed, not long ago, your suggestion of razing the Ein Bokek hotels was under serious consideration! In the end, however, the State of Israel seems to have reached an agreement with the Dead Sea Works company to dredge out the pools to keep the water at bay.

TOM POWERS / Jerusalem

To judge by decades of readers’ emails (though nowhere near as much correspondence as in the aerogram heyday of the late 80s when I used to bring home box loads from the office) I’m convinced that at least 90 per cent of guide book readers only ever read 10 per cent of the guide, and if you spend any time on the country forums at Trip Advisor or the Thorn Tree, the focus of those users on the same bog-standard list of targets in any country or city is clearer still.

So the publishers are right, to a large extent, to be putting the weight of their efforts into the areas that most people seem interested in – few choices, more copycat styling so that the guides are increasingly indistinguishable. The only problem with that approach is that those same areas are precisely the ones that are covered in such apparent detail on a million websites. And if all the travel info you need is available online, for free – right? as we’re always being told – why would you buy a guide?

We travel authors need to look to the expertise we have and use it/sell it as well as we can to the 10 per cent who are prepared to pay for it. Increasingly I think that means getting involved in the business of organising and selling travel, from offering blogs and background text to actually working for tour operators, rather than just commenting from on high in our guides and articles. And maybe we can find a way to compete for eyeballs with the unverifiable mass of Trip Advisor’s output (“the only thing in travel publishing that’s not falling off a cliff” according to one industry cheese, but I think we can all see that) by offering curated expertise from trusted sources.

I agree, cities matter most for this. And I also agree geocodes/longlats will certainly become essential, you’re absolutely right. I said “currently” – meaning, under current payment terms. Collecting them for a guidebook/app is a massive amount of extra work, for which publishers should pay. Just wrapping the task into the current terms is the non-viable bit.

Cities are where the longlats are important – I agree longlatting (word? – please tell me it isn’t) some desert sand dune is a bit silly, but we do it for waterfalls and general points of interest.

You may consider them to be a non viable addition to the author publisher relationship, but they will become essential to a publisher that wishes to remain viable.

Longlats aside, as I consider them a bit of a special case, more generally I agree that chasing the finer points of data and treating everything as a POI is a bit ridiculous.

@Stuart – hahaha! HAHAHA! Brilliant. Love it. “Buy them one”. That’s fantastic. Publisher should just BUY EVERY AUTHOR A SMARTPHONE! Of course! Hahaha. Wooh. They’ll get right on it. I’m sure, straight after buying me a pina colada every afternoon.

;-) You can’t get a paper-clip out of a publisher these days, Stuart.

Sure it’s only a coupla minutes. That’s, say, 50-75 “coupla minutes” per city. Say 8-10 cities in a book. That’s three full 8-hour working days added, per project, just simply recording longlats. Never mind transcribing them into whatever format the publisher is using. And that’s just cities. We haven’t talked about the desert/jungle/outback/offshore islands.

In the current situation, imho that’s not a viable addition to the author-publisher relationship…

Otherwise, more generally, totally agree. It’s called a guidebook rather than a gospel book for a reason.

My personal favourite was working on an un-named African country a few years ago and jumping through hoops to find out the name of a road, which was called either ‘Cathedral Avenue’ or ‘Hospital Avenue’ depending on who you asked and where it was you wanted to go. Ultimately meaningless, but gosh the editors hate it if you can’t provide the exact name!

I’m currently writing a guide for Bradt – since I did my last book with them they’ve actually switched over to the price bracket system for listings instead of exact prices. From a personal point of view I’ve found it quite liberating in terms of research and writing, and not having to worry about whether the rate was seasonal or if I added in the tax to get the final total (which will have changed by the time the book is a year old anyway). I hope that works for the reader. But what I’m really enjoying about their particular format is that while the listings are important, they’re only really a part of it – the text has the space to breathe so I’ve got the chance to dig a bit more into the context of the place, so the reader can get to understand the destination a little better. To me, that feels more important than providing an email address for a dry cleaner or whatever.

To some degree it’s horses for courses – if you get two travellers together you’ll get three opinions about makes a good guidebook, but I do think that the two big beasts in the jungle are converging and becoming less distinctive. I think the success of the DK Eyewitness guides – with their lists and visually seductive bite-sized snippets has been a big influence here. For my money, over-burdening readers with information for the sake of it isn’t the way to go though, and the ‘one-size fits all’ that these template approaches encourage aren’t always helpful when it comes to distinguishing a guide to Barcelona with a guide to Bolivia, where users have very different needs.

@valpaparazzi – you’re right, there’s a lot of sameyness out there, but it depends a lot on the editor and/or the publication. Occasionally, a Best Of is just a design-friendly way to slice and dice a destination, covering the same ground as a feature but with bits of prose no longer than a paragraph. Love that or hate it, at least it can tell you something new. Most of the time, though…

@East – fax numbers for restaurants – that’s great!

@connergo – “ditch the guidebook”: essential advice.

@Jules – many thanks for the correction; much appreciated. I hear your point – but it sounds to me like when you print £90 in the book, you’re saying you might actually mean £80 sometimes. And £100 at other times. If it’s £90 only some of the time, why not print Around £90? Or, better still, Around £80-100? And there’s also the issue that prices at Jordanian hotels tend to be a touch more fluid than at Yorkshire B&Bs ;-)

@Hal – it’s a good point. Sometimes knowing less is an asset.