I also wanted to move the site off WordPress so I could customise it further, make it more of a professional concern – it also provides an opportunity to generate revenue, which in turn may lead to others becoming involved in the site.

So I’ve gone and done it, and you can see the results at Twitchhiker.com or Twitchhiker.co.uk – the former is redirecting to the latter at the moment, but the main site will become Twitchhiker.com in the next few days.

I’ve still to transfer some (not all) of the older posts from this WordPress site, and I’ll be leaving it up for the time being.

Head on over and take a look around!

I’m really pleased with it – partly because the designer was sourced through Twitter (many thanks to @JO_PARRY_ART for her wonderful work) but also because the cover quotes are from two of my favourite people – Radio 2′s Alex Lester and Guardian columnist (and radio legend) Martin Kelner. In the words of Edouard LaPaglie: “I know I would.”

Three weeks to go!

First of all, Venice isn’t Amsterdam.

Of course it isn’t, so why would I ever think it was? Because I’ve visited Amsterdam before, and it’s another European city famous the world over for its canals, so it was my only point of reference before visiting Venice. I expected there to be similarities, but there were none whatsoever.

In Amsterdam, there are plenty of canals, but there’s also an established transport system on land – cars, buses, trams, bicycles and so on. In Venice, there’s a single land bridge stretching two miles across the Venetian lagoon that connects Venice to mainland Italy; there are four lanes for traffic and four railway lines. All of these terminate in the north east of the city.

Beyond this small pocket of roads and rails, you won’t see anything else with wheels in the city.

There are canals everywhere – there used to be more, though many were filled in and are now streets – and everything travels through Venice by boat; luggage bound for hotels, goods bound for shops. If you want to get about, there’s the vaporetti – water buses that serve the shoreline of the island and the Grand Canal through the heart of Venice – and private water taxis that dart about the smaller canals.

The alternative is that you walk – Venice is barely a mile across by two miles long. I spoke with several Venetians who still live on the island (many Venetians now live on the mainland because tourism has ramped up the cost of property), and they rarely use the vaporetti – they’ll walk everywhere.

Pedestrianised Venice is quite surreal; the lack of land traffic means it feels both futuristic and stuck in a distant century. It’s perfectly peaceful, too – get away from the disneyfied city centre of San Marco, and life is but a dream. We stayed in Cannaregio in the north of the city at the Hotel Ai Mori D’oriente – clean, quiet and affordable (£75 per room per night). Early morning sees a trickle of Venetians heading to work, but otherwise life is serene and still.

Immediately to the south of the hotel is Fondamenta de la Misericordia, a street with a handful of quality restaurants and bars – my favourite was Jimon, a cracking wine bar serving locals and visitors, snug and serving a very decent menu of wine from €2 a glass. Dining out is expensive in Venice but, as always, that doesn’t mean it’s an expensive place to visit. There are plenty of fresh bakeries and sandwich shops tucked away in the streets that’ll see you fed for under €5.

At the eastern end of this street, you’ll also find a bridge; not a huge surprise given that there are over 450 in Venice, but this particular bridge is the last in the city not to be walled or have any handrails. This is how most bridges were in the past, before Venetians no doubt realised they spent an awful lot of time falling off them:

Overall, Venice is brilliant for a three day city break. There are plenty to sights to see, plenty of places to visit and boats will take you to visit other islands in the lagoon. San Marco, the city centre, is rammed with tourists (most of North America seemed to be on vacation in Venice during the summer) and it’s very cramped, dirty and uncomfortable, but head north into the neighbourhood of Cannaregio or east into Castello, and there’s a wonderfully slow, melodic pace to life – as if Italians weren’t laid back enough.

All that said, Venice probably isn’t somewhere I’d go again – that’s not to say it isn’t worth visiting, not at all. For me, it falls into the same category as Prague – a great experience, but it didn’t feel like there was enough to pull me back a second time. By all means go and see it; soak up some Venetian sun, avoid all restaurants in San Marco (but do take a gondola if you’re going to visit once – at €80 per gondola it’s expensive, but you experience Venice from water level) and explore the canals and alleys of a city trapped somewhere between the between the past and the future.

There are a few more photos lurking over at Flickr if you’d like to see more.

First, there’s Venice – I’ve never been and it’ll no doubt be spilling over with tourists, but it’s Jane’s birthday (quite a significant anniversary that I won’t reveal for fear of a death blow to the kidneys), so we’re flying to Italy in the morning. Any hints or tips on what to do beyond the obvious, I’d love to hear them. Then it’s the family holiday, for which we’ll be flying out to Barcelona then onto Salou – I’ll be spending my 35th birthday in a theme park on rollercoasters and log flumes. Aces.

Meanwhile, a friend I made during Twitchhiker, Anastasia (@accessinspirati), has invited me back to Petaluma, California to be part of SocialBizWorld – a two day social media and web conference. It’s brilliant to be asked to participate – I’ll be presenting and putting some round table discussions together for the event – but it’s also an opportunity to indulge in the fine hospitality of Petaluma and Sonoma.

Since I’m on the West coast, I may travel back via one or two other places and catch up with other Twitter uaers. Wichita, maybe. We’ll see.

And in the future I promise not to mope when I’m not travelling; when I bought my currency for Venice this morning, the shop assistant exhaled in disappointment: “I’ve always wanted to go to Venice, I wish I could go.” My reply? “Then go.” What excuse do you have not to step beyond your front door? If you want to travel, don’t make excuses – do it.

I’m really pleased that the two winners were amongst the final four I put forward; their video entries were colourful and exciting, well crafted and engaging. They’re called Matt and Becky – you’ll find them on Twitter here and here, and they’ve just posted their first video from Ho Chi Minh City.

Have a look, follow their adventures, support them, be inspired and remember to try it for yourself before real life gets in the way:

Anyway, yesterday I spied this in the grasp of a journalist – it’s a trade sampler of the book, which features the first draft of the first seven chapters. It’s produced to encourage wholesalers to stock the book and to pique the interest of the press.

I hadn’t seen a copy of it before, and became a little too excitable. Actually, I was looking for an opportunity to steal it, but short of a mugging it wasn’t going to happen.

Before yesterday, I only knew my book as a lengthy Word document, so it was surreal to see a sample of it typeset, my name splashed across the covers. Admittedly it’s the name of several thousand other people too, but I put those words inbetween those covers; where else will you read a book that travels three continents and takes in social media, human kindness, Indiana Jones, Glen Campbell, moon rock, Afterburner, Fox Mulder, hobbits, Porky Pig, Nutella, Rhys Ifans, dolphins, Superman II and Liv Tyler?

Very, very exciting. And not long to go!

And then there’s the voice telling me to simply sling some clothes into a bag and disappear into the world.

In short, I have a severe case of wanderlust. It’s been building for the past few weeks, to the point where it’s now overwhelming. It’s excruciating. I don’t stress that for the sake of effect – there’s a considerable sense of panic, claustrophobia even, if I dwell the situation for too long.

Image by adamjackson1984 on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

But of course, there’s the reality of the situation. Money. Work. A manic few months ahead. I might escape for a couple of days in June, otherwise it’s the end of September before I can seriously consider travelling. The wait feels as if it’s going to kill me.

Yawning spans of time between trips are par for the course, because we have to scrimp and save to afford them, or we need to commit to the mundane trivialities of what some laughingly refer to as real life. So how do you quench your thirst? How you stem the loss of hours to idle daydreaming? If you’re a serial traveller, how do you stop your feet itching when you can’t travel just yet? Let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, the Twitchhiker book is into its third draft – currently there’s 25 per cent off if you order from Amazon; I’m not sure whether a book being reduced before it’s finished is good or bad news, but you could always buy it and judge for yourself. It won’t be 25 per cent worse for it, I’m certain of that.

Closer to home in Gateshead, and at something of a tangent to anything else mentioned so far, one of my favourite buildings is undergoing a facelift. The Central bar dates back to the mid 19th Century, and while it might be a hostelry I rarely frequented until recently (the ash-stained, toothless pensioners preferred their own company), it’s an adorable structure.

Designed in 1854 (the year of the Great Fire of Gateshead) and known locally as the Coffin, it occupies a wedge of land at the south west corner of the iconic Tyne Bridge. At the time it was built, the surrounding streets were the bustling thoroughfares of the town; Gateshead East railway station stood on the bridge immediately behind the Central.

In the decade since I moved to Gateshead, I’ve watched this corner of the world slowly regenerate from a slag-blackened heap of rubble and industry, and I’m delighted that somebody had the foresight to preserve one of the town’s most charismatic buildings. The Central was recently bought by a local bar chain who have spent tens of thousands of pounds restoring the brickwork, and after several months the covers and scaffolding have been removed:

Compare it to how the Central looked before the renovations began, in a photo by Paul White. Now the exterior is finished, work will start on the interior; the Central has a rather dubious past if you listen to the scuttlebutt, with hotel rooms on the first floor rented by the hour.

Soon it’ll be a live music venue with a rooftop bar, and will surely be one of the finest night-time venues in the region. If you’re passing through the north east of England in the coming months, make the effort to drop by; it’s a wonderful building in a neighbourhood that will blossom in the next couple of years, and I’ll probably be propping up the bar once or twice in there a week.

I’ll tell you more about the writing process at some point, suffice to say it was the most difficult things I’ve done in my life. And there’s still oodles of work to be done; as this is the first draft, I’ve now got to work with my editor Lucy at Summersdale on revising the text and crafting it into better shape – editing, deleting, expanding where appropriate.

So lots to do, then, but I can now sleep a little more soundly. It also means if you’ve pre-ordered the Twitchhiker book on Amazon (and I’d be delighted if you did) there’s a far better chance of you receiving it, as opposed to a couple of months ago when the words were still locked in my head and stubbornly refusing to spill out through my fingers.

I’ll let you know more as and when I can, and hopefully I’ll be able to let you see the fabulous cover too, which was produced by @JO_PARRY_ART. It’s worth buying for that alone, as well as the foreword by the delectable @jemimakiss. Hooray!

I met plenty of brilliant people last night, the highlights being shaking hands with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and having a beer with Janis Krums, who helped push Twitter in the mainstream with a single photo. I also got to meet my fellow finalists, including @newyorkology – one of the finest Twitter users out there (and Amy’s website is pretty cool, too). The company was great, the bar was free. Perfect.

If you voted, thank you. If you supported the Twitchhiker project last year – whether you followed from afar, provided words of encouragement, offered to put me up on your sofa, shouted me a beer, drove me from here to there – then this really is your award, because it simply wouldn’t have happened without your involvement.

So to summarise: I’m in New York, I have no hangover, the award is in one piece and Stephen Fry has been in touch. Not the best day of my life, but a very good one.

The Downtown Alliance published this photo on Twitter earlier, and it’s the sort of thing I can look at for hours – it’s a map of Manhattan as it was in the early 17th Century before it was settled, with the current outline and streets superimposed on top:

It isn’t just Battery Park City (at the top of the image) that was built on top of landfill – several hundred acres of land were added all the way around Manhattan as debris from foundations was dumped onto the shorelines.

If you’ve stood in Battery Park and looked back at the city, you’ll notice the skyscrapers of Manhattan come to an abrupt halt. That’s because they’re built on the original island in place of previous buildings, and the park was created from scratch in the 19th century.

Aside from forests, Manhattan also used to be covered in marshland and rivers. They’ve all been built over (aside from the forests at the Northern tip of Manhattan in Inwood), but you can still see the history. In the centre of the map, I noticed a stream meeting the original shoreline of the East River, and that just upstream there’s a street that appears to follow its course. A quick check of Google Maps reveals it to be Maiden Lane – immediately the name stands out because you don’t find many ‘lanes’ in Manhattan. The fact that it cuts across other streets also suggests it follows the path of an ancient river. And in fact, it did.

Of course, history’s everywhere you look, but New York gets me every time.

How much is all of this going to cost you? Nothing.

What’s the catch?

You have to win the STA Travel’s 2010 World Traveller Internship – so less of a catch, more of a competition. Somebody’s got to see those sights, however, so it might as well be you.

I’ve pleased to be lending a hand in judging the third round of the contest, so I thought I’d tell you a little about it.

Not only is this internship about experiencing the world, it’s about sharing those experiences  – perhaps through blog posts, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or my favourite platform of the moment, audioBoo. So during the judging round we’ll take an interest in you if you’re ravenous to travel, but also if you’re capable of engaging an audience, narrating a story, allowing others to walk by your side, to see the world through your eyes, to travel vicariously through you.

Interested? Of course you are. See the 2010 World Traveller Internship website here, and read more about the entry process here. There’s also a video of the Internship launch worth watching on YouTube.

A word of advice – if you want this opportunity, get in there now. To reach the second round, you to among the 50 most popular entries, so you’ll stand a better chance if you enter soon and drum up votes from friends and colleagues. Good luck!

Last month I returned after a year’s absence – the first time for a week to knuckle down and write, the second time to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. Had anything changed? I think so. Barcelona certainly felt more accommodating. There was a higher police presence in the city centre and along La Rambla, and despite inclement weather there were plenty of people enjoying the streets.

El Ravel, the slums of the old city that have been gentrified in the last decade, is finally enjoying a trickle of curious tourists – the redevelopment of La Rambla Del Raval is drawing people through and into the neighbourhood. That’s not to say there weren’t some characters still hanging about outside Bar Marcella. While writing I’d stopped in Sant Antoni, the neighbourhood to the west of El Ravel, very working class with few attractions for the tourists. Again, the streets were quiet and safe after dusk.

Whether the authorities have dealt with the issue of gang crime and prostitution or simply moved it along, is another story. It’s a problem that Barcelona has never seemed to solve satisfactorily, but at least now it’s not so blatantly obvious as it was when it made front page news in Spain last year. I didn’t like that Barcelona very much.

That said, you still need to stick to the rules. Leave everything you can in the hotel – if you don’t need a handbag or backpack, don’t take it. If an opportunist doesn’t try and mug you, they may slash the bottom of the bag to steal. Wallets, phones, purses – inside a jacket that’s zipped up, or front trouser pockets only. You get the idea.

I didn’t stray too far from the city centre on the second occasion, but discovered loads of new treats such as Carrer de Josep Anselm Clave in the Old Town, a narrow street away from the base of La Rambla and running parallel to the sea front. It’s chock full of restaurants and bars, including the delectable Margarita Blue, which promises live trapeze acts through the week. Nearby Carrer Ample and Carrer de la Merce have an abundance of stops, too. In fact there’s a whole night out waiting for you in just these three streets.

And this, by the way, was what happened when I asked for a reccommendation from the locals in an El Born restaurant. Ladies and gentlemen, horse pizza. I’ll try anything once. But not necessarily twice.

I never expected it to, and I vehemently resisted it in the beginning. I just wanted everything to settle down, to get back to work, spend time with my family. I didn’t act on the calls to write a book – I accepted the offer of an agent but I barely lifted a finger. Nor did I bother exploiting what had become a brand, despite some very adamant individuals with money wanting me to.

But slowly, everything changed. I changed. I found myself wanting to travel more – I’m desperate to travel to Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore when I have the money. I’ve been back to New Zealand, albeit briefly – I hovered in Auckland airport for an hour or two on my way to Australia to blog about Crave Sydney. I am writing a book, although that offer didn’t appear until November – eight months after I’d finished my trip. And aside from this blog, I’ve given up on travel writing – I haven’t the time for commissioning editors who either ignore every pitch or blatantly steal them, passing them onto staff writers as a cheaper option.

And now, on the first anniversary of Twitchhiker, we’re able to celebrate it all over again.

Twitchhiker is in the finalists for the Shorty Awards, a celebration of people who have done something different and unique with Twitter – it’s among a handful of brilliant finalists in the travel section.

Plenty of you have voted for Twitchhiker in the past month and for that I’m blatheringly grateful. To win, however, I need one last favour: the voting for the winner in each category begins at midday EST tomorrow (5pm for the UK) and continues for just five days. While the winner isn’t simply determined by the quantity of votes – other factors are taken into account – it certainly can’t hinder our chances.

So. If you thought Twitchhiker was a fun, interesting, unique or standout use of Twitter – please vote tomorrow.

When I talk about this, or Twitchhiker in general, I tend to about we, not I – I might have been the point man, but it never would have worked without the 40 or so people who directly helped me, the hundreds of offers, the thousands of followers or those that donated of thousands of pounds to charity: water. As far as unique, community-driven, travel-related uses of Twitter go, I don’t think it has been topped, and a Shorty Award would be the perfect way to celebrate what we did together.

It’d be fun to win. Not just for me, but for you too. Let’s see how the week goes.