jani

Due to a series of events rather too complex and delicate to explain here, some of my contributions to Wikitravel led to Jetstar Asia, my new favorite Singaporean low-cost carrier, offering me a sweet freelancer gig to traipse around Cambodia for a week, flights and hotels paid, then scribble some articles about it and get paid for that too -- if deemed good enough to publish in their inflight magazine. Open Source nazi that I am, I naturally insisted (and got) the right to maintain the copyright to the works, so here they are for your reading pleasure:

• A Stroll on Sisowath Quay (Phnom Penh)

• Sihanoukville: The Rebirth of a Dream (Sihanoukville)

• Going Amok in Siem Reap (Siem Reap)

And I was asked to write about the hotels I stayed in too:

• Raffles Le Royal (Phnom Penh)

• Sokha Beach Resort (Sihanoukville)

• Le Meridien Angkor (Siem Reap)

• Casa Angkor (Siem Reap)

NB: If the article name is not linked above, that's because I haven't posted the story here yet.

Now while it seems churlish and ungrateful to complain after getting a free splurge-class vacation and being paid for it too, I'll quietly whinge a little anyway. On Wikitravel and my private writings on Flyertalk, I'm a free agent and can merrily engage in acerbic potshots and skewering terrible attractions, hotels, etc. In an in-flight magazine, the main purpose of the story is to sell more trips, so rose-tinted glasses are needed for any destination stories. Committing a few sins of omission for this wasn't too hard, but writing hotel "reviews" that are not allowed to say a single bad thing about an advertiser is a little difficult even if you're staying in the Raffles (which really is a spectacular hotel), and a lot difficult if you're staying in a thoroughly generic three-star with so few redeeming features that, to meet my 450-word quota, I had to resort to praising the complimentary tea bags and the bowl of lumpy porridge at breakfast. At least here on Crossroads I can add an extra paragraph at the end listing everything that was omitted from the sanitized version. Oh, the woe of selling out to The Man...

...but, soulless capitalist that I am, I'm already busily poring over Jetstar's route map and plotting my next trip on their dime. Sigh.