We are constantly amazed by the passion for food and recipe-sharing of the Thorn Tree forum on the Get Stuffed branch. If you’ve got a foodie question, this is the place for answers! We’ve often talked of how fantastic it would be to compile a Thorn Tree cookbook…but until that day, why not try one of these recipes from around the globe? Everyone posts their versions of dishes and it’s interesting to see how tried and tested they are. So grab an apron and start clicking!

Ratatouille

Dumplings – & Boston Creme Pie

Chilli Con Carne

Butter Chicken

Thai curry (the street food kind)

Rugelach

Panna cotta

New York Cheesecake

Stamppot

Traditional Polish Christmas Carp

Sourdough bread

Core Pie

Tilapia

Jambalaya

Vancouver-style mussels

The secrets of crispy duck/pork

Squirrel

Got a recipe or cooking tip you’d like to share?  Let’s hear it!

Has technology ruined travel? Has our obsession with, and reliance on, gadgetry stopped us from being brave bounders climbing mountains and turned us into a horde of shuffling tweeters? To argue the question, Lonely Planet’s US travel editor Robert Reid gets into the ring with Lonely Planet’s Community Manager Venessa Paech.

In the ‘Yes it has ruined travel!’ corner, Robert says:

In the rockumentary ‘It Might Get Loud,’ White Stripes’ founder Jack White says ‘Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. Yeah, it makes it easier… But that’s a disease you have to fight in any creative field: ease of use.’

He’s talking rock music, but I see travel as a creative field too. Going to a place and trying to find authentic experiences, be it hunting down a winner baguette, making friends at a soccer game, or watching the sun dip down over a lake. The best comes with time to pass, and time to absorb where we are. It’s an analog landscape.

Certainly technology makes accessing information and documenting things easy. Digital cameras allow amateurs to take hundreds of shots till they get that Coliseum shot right. Smart phones can remind us the capital of Paraguay, and let us send instant-messages, tweets or capture video. But that’s sort of the problem too. Convenience means we immerse less. Before email, when you were in a place, you were in a place.

I remember 15 years ago, having to hunt down public phones in India to give progress reports to my concerned mama back in Oklahoma. After several miscommunication hurdles in Udaipur, locals gifted me snacks in a long line in a post office. I munched and took a photo a cute handwritten sign that forbid weapons unless you were a Sikh, in which it was “OK to carry a sword on your person.” A memorable hour or so of everyday life. And I can’t imagine why I’d ever really need to go there now. I’d just send an email from the back of a cab.

Instant virtual access means less time to absorb your real surroundings.  If you have just one or two chances to photograph that Coliseum with 35mm camera, and don’t see immediate results, I bet you you’ll look at the original longer. And probably see it better too. Technology may make travel easier, and I do use it, but our experiences come diminished.

And fighting the pro-technology fight, we have Venessa:

Ah technology. Everybody’s favourite straw man. When it’s not corrupting our youth and stealing our souls, it’s killing travel. In actual fact, technology is making more of us travel, further, than ever before. The age of the social web is the age of the niche – whatever our travel passion, we’ll find like-minded souls to help us make it happen. The online brains trust of traveler reviews and Google mapplications  gives formerly nervous nomads the confidence to get up and go. Off the beaten track, once out of reach, is now within our grasp, with geo-smarts and real-time assistance from locals at your fingertips. Even if we’re offline when we get there, technology can make getting there smoother and richer.

Travelling alone can make some people feel vulnerable. The ability to access and manage flight details, transport schedules, instantly translate languages and check in with home while still on the road can transform trembling into intrepid.

In our unstable 21^st century, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and tsunamis are a devastating reality of our travelling lives and can create terrible chaos. Technology is a travelers ally here too, delivering critical updates, web access when it counts, and the chance to turn misfortune into opportunity (downloading free guides if you’re stranded, or connecting on Facebook or Twitter with nearby strangers for ride or accommodation shares). Like it or not, we rely on technology to plan our travels. Our gadgets and networks help us keep it together when it’s falling apart.

Has technology changed travel? Undoubtedly. Has it killed our wanderlust? Only if we let it.

Rebuttal

Robert: I use technology all the time. I fly with e-tickets, I tweet and email and blog, take hundreds of digital shots, edit videos with breezy software back home. To shun all technology is like marching into Agincourt without a long bow. It’s the way things are going, and will continue to go. That’s fine. But no matter how hard a few try to keep fires lit on travel’s wanderlust, all that that accessibility and convenience – making it easier for more to go farther, do more – means we’ll immerse less than we used to. We already are.

Venessa: Finding those white spaces amidst the white noise is travel at its best. But it’s not technology that threatens moments of reflection and immersion. It’s speed. Remember Clark Griswold? People were rushing through destinations, checking off the itinerary and the icons at breakneck pace long before the internet.  Technology offers new ways to refract and reflect, giving us tools to set our own internal travel rhythm.

So what do you think? Let’s hear it!

Lonely Planet’s new England guide has just been released. Here David Else, the lead author on the book, answers some questions about the title and travel in England.

What picture do you paint of England in the new edition of the guide?

We paint a picture of a country that is ideal for visitors: rich in history, full of variety, and easy to get around. In the book we say:

“…travel here is a breeze. Granted, it may not be totally effortless, but it’s easy compared with many parts of the world.”

and

“In this compact country you’re never far from the next town, the next pub, the next restaurant, the next national park or the next impressive castle on your hit-list of highlights.”

We also describe  a country where visitors are spoilt for choice. When researching the guide, we personally visited a huge number of places to stay and eat, and we list a fantastic selection of the best and best-value hotels, B&Bs, pubs and restaurants across the country.

Some of your comments which have been published in the media suggest a more negative view.  Is the guide negative about England?

Overall, we are very positive about England as a nation, and for the sights and attractions that travellers can enjoy. For example, in the book’s introduction we say:   “From Hadrian’s Wall in the north to Canterbury Cathedral in the south, England’s astounding variety is a major reason to travel here. City streets buzz day and night, with tempting shops and restaurants, and some of the finest museums in the world. After dark, cutting-edge clubs, top-class theatre and formidable live music provide a string of nights to remember. Next day, you’re deep in the English countryside or enjoying a classic seaside resort.”

What struck you most about England while researching the new edition of the guide?

The quality of facilities for tourists keeps on getting better every year, whatever their budget – from boutique city hotels to country B&Bs, from fine food in restaurants to no-frills pub grub.

You’ve got a week in England. Where do you go?

In the book we emphasise England’s compact geography: visitors spend less time travelling between places, and more time IN them. We suggest several itineraries, and a week-long ‘highlights’ trip might take in Stonehenge, Bath, Oxford and York. More off-the-beaten-track ideas for visitors might meander through the West Country or along the east coast from Suffolk to Northumberland.

Headed to Austin for the South By Southwest conferences and festivals? Heck, you could be planning a trip to see a Longhorns football game, to satisfy a barbecue craving, or to see concerts in one of the USA’s best music year-round music cities. Whatever the reason is, the new Lonely Planet Austin City Guide app for iPhone and iPod Touch will help guide you to the best that the Texas capital has to offer on your next trip.

For a limited time, download the Lonely Planet Austin Guide for free from iTunes (normally US$5.99; free through March 15, 12 pm PST). Includes insider tips from Lonely Planet authors, offline maps, and everything you need to navigate Austin and find your way to a good time (or at least a nice big breakfast after you had a bit too much of a good time the night before).

We’ve got more Austin info online too, including tips for getting the most out of your trip to SXSW, and and a detailed guide to Texas barbecue including our authors’ picks for the best of the best in Austin and across the state. And if you prefer your travel info printed on that time-tested stuff we call ‘paper’, check out our newly released Lonely Planet Texas travel guide.

Looking for other apps to help you navigate SXSW? Check out this handy summary of the best SXSW and Austin mobile apps by BBC Travel.

What kind of traveller are you? Do you like to keep the bottom line lean or are you a bit of a Good Time Charlie when it comes to hitting the road? Luxury vs budget – which is the way to go? Let’s debate it.

Budget

'Nope, out of my budget...'

In the budget corner, we have Mark, Lonely Planet’s research librarian:

Of what value is staying at expensive hotels on your vacation when travellers spend 95% of their waking hours outside it experiencing a foreign culture? A clean bed, a window and bathroom are more than enough. Furthermore, if you do choose to spend 5% of your waking time at a cloned five-star international hotel chain or a trendy boutique hotel, it isn’t going to help you experience a destination. Instead, try a locally owned guesthouse where you’ll meet people who’ve lived in the neighbourhood all their lives and can recommend the best eating options and sights.

On eating options…expensive restaurants are not only painful to your wallet, they rarely have the best food. More than likely, most of the cost of the meal is in the decor or the clean table cloth, not the chef or the ingredients. Small, cheap eateries will frequently specialise in doing one thing extremely well. It could be a simple bowl of noodles or tandoori chicken. Whatever the meal, they do it all day, and customers flock to them because the food is great, not because their cutlery is solid silver and the waiter is obsequious. Also, while eating your tandoori, you’re more likely to be sitting next to a local, not another tourist looking for steak and chips in Mumbai.

On sightseeing…one of the most ridiculous excesses of travel is a cruise ship. You spend most of your time with other ‘travellers’, disembark for an afternoon of shopping for souvenirs every few days, and get fat on the all-you-can-eat buffet every four hours. This is not travel…it is an expensive screensaver.

We all like to spoil ourselves now and again. And we are more inclined to spoil ourselves when we are on vacation. However, spoiling ourselves too much can ruin the primary reason for travelling: experiencing the real texture of a place.

Luxury

'Is that all they could send? Guess we can squish up...'

And fighting the fight for luxury, we have Jane, Lonely Planet’s digital copywriter:

I do not like pressing my nose up against the bakery window. I like to get in there and breathe in.

That’s what luxury travel means to me. It doesn’t mean lounging in ermine in the penthouse suite of the Plaza. It means hopping a cab to get straight into a city rather than waiting, waiting, waiting for a bone-rattling bus to get me to the train station to wait amidst the wafts of urine and boredom for a train to get me eight blocks from the freezing hostel I’ll be sleeping in with my valuables under my pillow.

Dutch painter Willem de Kooning once said ‘The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.’ I hate eking out an existence. I’ve been there and it bored the hell out of me. So it’s the last thing I want to do when I’m diving into a new city. I just want to get stuck in.

It’s about quality over quantity – wouldn’t you rather have a week of kick-your-heels-up good times drinking martinis with local eccentrics and seeing amazing off-Broadway shows than two weeks of canned tuna and thinking ‘if only’?  Plus it’s about knowing what works for you. Drum circles in hostel courtyards send me homicidal. Hotel toiletries do not.

Some people think a luxury approach will give you a less authentic, less educational travel experience. Well I learnt more about the history of Los Angeles from the tour guide who drove me all over town in a ’66 open-topped cherry-red Cadillac, and I learnt more about the spirit of the place from the old-school waiters I met in restaurants.

Luxury doesn’t mean ivory tower travel – it just means travel with options. It takes the drag factor out of your journey – cos sucking it up gets pretty boring when you’re hungry, jetlagged and as fragrant as a wet sock.

Rebuttal:

Mark: A taxi drove me around all night in LA with three girls from my hostel who the cabbie was trying to hit on. He showed us Beverly Hills, including Sharon Tate’s house, ‘Nakatomi Plaza’ from Die Hard (Fox Plaza), and many other sights. Cost: zero. A lot of money doesn’t make a trip special.

Jane: Hey I’m not into cheesy cruises or pulling a Greta Garbo in a 5-star hotel. A bit of luxury means you can still experience the real texture of a place – it’s just that after you’ve experienced it you can have a decent shower without some dodgy fire-twirler called BamBam stealing your towel from the communal bathroom.

So what do you think? Get in the ring and take a swing!

The royal wedding. Love it or loathe it? Should you head to London to see it – or run in the opposite direction?

Lonely Planet’s London office has been arguing over this very question ever since Prince William and Kate Middleton got engaged. Some simply can’t wait for the big day, others are keen to avoid it at all costs (and make good use of the public holiday). We asked two of our London staff to explain their differing opinions.

FOR: Tom Hall, UK Travel Editor

The house believes London is the place to be on April 29.

Firstly, I’m confused as to where else you’d want to be. Are you seriously going to spend the day hiding away in a museum or halfway up a mountain, ‘accidentally’ catching glimpses of both the ceremony and other people’s delight?

Anti-monarchists will bemoan the fuss, the cost and grab the holiday available and flee. This is missing the point. Travel is about experiencing the unforgettable and there’s only one place to be for that on April 29. London will be the centre of the world, even more so than usual. And it will be at its best.

The royal wedding is a unique way of seeing the British capital. In case you haven’t noticed, central London is designed so people can gawp at royalty. The Mall forms a picture-perfect processional route from Westminster Abbey on special occasions and can only truly be appreciated lined with happy people from around the world. All over the city and the UK there’ll be street parties and a jovial mood. Strangers may even make eye contact on the tube.

So don’t be miserable. Grab a Union Jack umbrella and give it a twirl for the folks back home. In years to come you’ll be glad you did.

AGAINST: Heather Carswell, Senior Media & Communications Executive

What’s fascinating to me is not the future King of England’s nuptials but the fact that people are so excited by it.

Sharing in the happy celebrations of a friend or family member’s big day, quaffing champagne, amusing Best Man speeches and watching uncoordinated relatives do the Macarena are just some of the things that make weddings such fun. So a wedding that I am not invited to, for a couple I don’t know, holds zero interest to me.

I won’t be privy to Prince Harry’s hilarious speech nor will I witness the Duke of Edinburgh throwing shapes on the dance floor. Instead, watching the ceremony on TV or jostling for space amongst hundreds of thousands of well-wishers in central London is as close to this wedding as us ordinary folk can get.

I’m not alone in feeling lacklustre about the big day. In my friendship group, the hot topic of conversation since the date of the wedding was announced has been around how best to spend the extra public holiday that Brits have been given in honour of the big day.

Coming hot on the heels of the Easter Break makes it the perfect time to take a trip without using much precious annual leave. With billions of people across the globe glued to their TVs on the big day, my advice would be to get out of London and you will have a royally good time.

We’ve heard what our London-based team think, but we want to know what you think? Will you be flying into, or out of London for the big day? Or will you watch on TV along with an estimated one billion plus people around the globe?

One of the best ways to get to know a place is one of the easiest – just walk around it. So we asked you: What are your favourite cities to walk around?

You voted for 186 different cities. London topped the list, closely followed by New York City, Paris, Rome, then Prague.

Image by E01

Si Braybrooke explained the attraction of walking London: ‘East London is amazing to walk around, especially as you have the sights and sounds of real history and then as you approach Tower Hill and the Thames the rest of the city opens up to you.’ London’s win, however, was conditional on the weather. Samraat Dash, for example, writes: ‘London when the sun’s out.’

Another voter, Scott Chalmers, explained what makes the top walking cities so attractive: ‘Rome, Barcelona, Florence, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Paris…. All with lots to see and do centrally with walking a good way to do it.’

Here’s the top 20 walking cities (according to popular vote):

What do you think? Do you think London deserves the most votes? Or are there other cobbled-lane alternatives you’d prefer to spend wandering? Perhaps they’re one of our top 6 cities to get lost in?

When it comes to travel, we all have our biases. Some of us like to rough it, others like to lie in the lap of luxury. Some of us like to plan to the nth degree, others like to fly by the seat of their pants. But one thing we all like to do here at Lonely Planet is debate about it. So, in the first of our travel debate series, we ask: What kind of holiday is better – a city break or a country getaway? Bang a gong, we are on!

Getting in the ring for the advantages of the country, we have Talk2Us Coordinator, Trent:

I’m a city dweller, and chances are you are too.  As we all know, city life is an endless grind of work, traffic, eat, pollution, sleep, and bad manners, fuelled by large doses of caffeine, beer and fatty food. It’s hard work, and to keep sane I need to regularly escape the madness and unwind, relax and recharge. So I travel. But when I do, why would I want to visit another city?

Well I don’t – when I hit the road I head straight for the countryside. The people are friendlier, the food is fresher and often local, and the pace is several notches slower. I can immerse myself in a destination without rushing to every famous tourist attraction before closing time. I can take long walks through fields and forests, or cycle along country lanes without inhaling toxic fumes. Queues, traffic, scammers and stress are unknown concepts outside the big smoke.

Cities are big, nasty, unfriendly places that will chew you up and spit you out, usually before you’ve left the airport terminal. Recent studies have shown that travellers to cities are 73% more likely to be assaulted, 84% more likely to fall ill and 128% more likely to have a really bad time than visitors to the countryside. I may have made those figures up but they’re 90% likely to be accurate, so take my word for it.

That’s not to say I don’t find myself in cities on occasion. Prolonged stopovers at major transport hubs allow me the opportunity to compare levels of street crime, public drunkenness and footpath dog poo to what I’m used to at home. I also get to see if multinational hamburger and coffee chain outlets resemble those I never visit in my own city. But after a couple of hours I’ve had more than enough.

So on your next trip take my advice, go rural and avoid big cities like the plague (which you’re more likely to catch in a city anyway, due to poor sanitation and overcrowding…).

And going in to bat for the cities, we have Lonely Planet’s research librarian, Mark:

Cities are exciting. You never know what’s around the next corner. In contrast, in the countryside you can go for hours and hundreds of kilometres without anything changing.

Nevertheless, people travel for days to see stuff (eg a waterfall), then, to defend the time they’ve wasted, convince themselves that it was amazing because not everyone is stupid enough to go there as well. I went to Iguazu Falls. It’s water falling. Sure, it’s lots of water falling, but just because something is big doesn’t make it amazing.

The sublime is overrated. Get over it. And, while you’re at it, get over the idea of the countryside being full of ‘noble savages‘. They are busy eking out a boringly hard existence. But, in any case, most countryside visitors treat the locals as part of the scenery anyway. They are busy visiting the countryside to ‘find themselves’, not to understand the locals. In a city you can submit to the anonymous chaos or engage with locals working in all manner of professions; in the countryside you stick out like a sore thumb and are sometimes treated as such because you’re not a farmer.

To conclude, cities have great food; the best thing you can say about countryside food is it’s fresh. In cities you find fun everywhere; the countryside is renowned for ‘fun’ adventure activities, but really they are Sisyphean at best (ascending a mountain, descending a mountain) or, worse, trying desperately to make inanimate rocks interesting (white water rafting). In cities you’ll learn about the destination’s culture and history in magnificent museums; in the countryside you’ll find really old trees.

And in rebuttal:

Trent: Cities are ‘exciting’, sure, but they’re mostly the same around the world, with similar buildings, similar fashion, similar shops, etc. No point in leaving home really. The only city folk you’ll meet are jaded types who work in the travel industry or scammers – hardly representative of the local populace.

Mark: Why leave your home city to visit another city on your travels? Because you’re on holiday – duh – you don’t have to commute to work, you don’t have to go to Starbucks or McDonald’s (even at home), and you don’t have to go to the boring ends of the earth to relax.

Well, you’ve heard those fightin’ words – so who do you think got smacked down? Cities or countrysides? Get in the ring and have your say!