Weekly Travel Scorecard [05.23.10]

As print newspapers fight to stay alive, travel sections lose pages and steadily increase service journalism while operating under more scrutiny than ever. In support of our paper/e-ink colleagues, here’s the Sunday print travel news that’s fit to post about.

The elements that make for a good travel story are the very same that make any sort of story good: character development, a narrative arc and a few surprises. Almost all of the stories in this week’s sections fit the bill, making for one of the best weeks in travel writing we’ve had for awhile. Despite the fact that both the LA Times and the Washington Post focused their sections on South Africa, in anticipation of the World Cup early next month, I don’t think I’ve ever said “hunh, who knew?” or laughed out loud to myself so many times during a Sunday newspaper-reading session.

First up, New York Times’ Frugal Traveler columnist Matt Gross deserves a pat on the back and a giant cold beer for managing to pull off, hands-down, the hardest assignment in travel writing: a story that is service-oriented and budget conscious and yet still narrative. He begins his tale of walking from Austria to Hungary by explaining why on earth he’d choose to undertake such a task: He’s following in the footsteps of the great English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Once upon a time, a young man went for a walk,” Gross begins. “It was December 1933, and an 18-year-old Englishman named Patrick Leigh Fermor put on a pair of hobnail boots and a secondhand greatcoat, gathered up his rucksack and left London on a ship bound for Rotterdam, where he planned to travel 1,400 miles to Istanbul — on foot. He had virtually no money; at best, he’d arrive in, say, Munich to find his mother had sent him

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