For the last month Andy Jarosz from the 501 Places travel blog has been editing and curating our blog. Andy has written a number of fantastic posts but is now heading out of the country for an extended trip to Central America. In his place (don't worry he'll be back fingers crossed!) we have invited Vicky Baker to take over the reins for December. Vicky is a travel writer for among others, The Guardian and Time Out Guides and specialises in writing about local life in South America, local travel and travel networking.

Introducing Vicky Baker

Vicky specialises in writing about local life in South America and travel networking, two ideas that she combined in a travel column that was published in the Guardian every Saturday for four months. The aim of the series was to escape the standard gringo trail and meet the locals using travel-networking sites. Since then, Vicky has become a spokesperson for this new mode of travel, speaking at events (TNT Travel Show) and on the radio (BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Five Live, Radio New Zealand). Vicky writes a brilliant blog Going Local Travel of which I am a huge fan and her most recent project was as editor of a new Time Out Guide to Argentina and Uruguay.

Re-Cap of recent posts

In addition to Andy's excellent posts, we've also published the first three of our travel essays series. The Tourdust travel essays series questions why we travel, how it effects the places we visit and ultimately how we can improve the impact we have on local communities. The essays published so far try to understand why we travel, in the the next section, we'll be touching on the impacts of travel in changing cultures, economic development and colonialism.  We've also got some brilliant guest posts lined up from various luminaries of the responsible travel world.

I have also recently been contributing to the Huffington Post travel section. The Huffington Post is one of the popular websites in the States with over 13 million monthly visitors. So far I have published two posts, The Atlas Mountains - Berbers, Mules and Peaks in Morocco and 6 things we get wrong when we travel.