There *is* something about old spa towns. Maybe it’s just the exaggerated power of suggestion induced by knowing that generations and legions of people have been drawn from far and wide to a particular place to have a particular experience.

Druskininkai is in southeastern Lithuania, near the borders with Poland and Belarus, and people get here in cars and buses from all three countries.

In Soviet times, there was a full-service aqua health park in Druskininkai. I’m standing in front of the mosaic mural at the entrance to it in the nearby photograph. Now the park is dilapidated but I like walking its grounds. I imagine buying it and bringing it back to life — which would be a very health-spa thing to do, really.

I picture Druskininkai in its mid-20th century prime, filled with workers on holiday “trying to cram lost years into five or six days,” in Jimmy Buffett terms — a Commie ROAD TO WELLVILLE, as it were, animated by a Soviet pseudoscience every bit as hopeful and hopeless as Kellogg’s Michegonian variety.

I get it, though. Whatever side of the Iron Curtain you’re on, we all want to live forever.

Warsaw, Poland — I’m just capping off a 5-day solo ramble (more accelerated than an amble, you see) to Ukraine and Poland. I travelled with only a daypack and an iPhone 4, and it was the freest I’ve felt on the road in years. This is in spite of a tight schedule and a lot of ground to cover. Here are my lessons, plus a few key app recommendations.

But first, a paragraph of background. My ancestors on my mother’s side are from somewhere near Lviv, in present-day Ukraine. I’ve been curious about the place for years, especially since visiting Kyiv last December to speak at a conference where the director of tourism for Lviv presented some beautiful slides of his city. I decided to use Lviv as destination one of a mini-Eastern European odyssey.

I started the trip in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I’m based for the summer. I booked the trip largely through Kayak.co.uk, a site which in conjunction with its app, continues to impress me and become a go-to service for flight reservations, and Booking.com, which also has a superb app for finding and booking hotels.

Vilnius is still a backwater, bless it, as is Lviv, so getting from A to B took two hops, and this is where travelling with only a daypack as carry-on came into its own. I had a 30-minute connection time in Riga (simple, as Air Baltic dominates this airport) and a 60-minute connection in Kyiv in which I had to clear customs and change terminals. A cakewalk, in the end.

(Aside: Ukrainian International Airlines has one of the most terrific web services I’ve used, including a button I clicked which put me straight through, at 10 o’clock at night, to an English-speaking agent; I called beforehand to get a better sense of the terminal change I was faced with. The UIA site does have an irritating animated stewardess Toast overlay pop-up thing, but at least she’s hot.)

You must understand that one reason I travel is to break with routine, so I value interesting hotels over conventionally nice ones. A comfortable bed, a window that opens and Wi-Fi are the primary amenities I need; most everything else is optional — though hot water is nice.

The Hotel George smack dab in the heart of Lviv, had hot water and local character in spades. I liked the place. Its highlight were the young women staffing the front desk. They were charming and helpful and, interestingly, worked 24-hour shifts, from 9am to 9am, which means service doesn’t flag due to handovers. The women liked this work pattern, too. Aligned to a natural cycle, they were more attuned to the flows of things, and then they had whole days off after each shift, so they could plan their own lives better. It will be nice when labour laws of advanced countries allow for this, which I’m guessing they don’t now.

After Lviv came a 10-hour train ride to Krakow, Poland, with a 7am departrue. I had a lower berth and the compartment to myself, and had stocked up on noshes like nuts and raisins and smoked sausage (and two litres of water) the night before. The only discomfort I had, in fact, was mental, as nobody spoke English and I was afraid I’d miss Krakow and end up somewhere else. Then I remembered I’d installed the free Europe Offline map, and so I used that to check the train journey’s progress. When the GPS showed we were drawing near Krakow, I packed up my stuff.

Krakow, once the imperial capital of Poland, impressed me with its grandeur — I did not expect the Wawel fortress, for instance — and comparisons with Prague strike me as very, very fair, including the throngs of tourists and the touts who love them. The rynok square at dusk was almost too vast and vibrant.

By the time I got to the Jewish quarter, it was dark and I my iPhone battery was dead. Feeling young, and not caring whether I slept that night, I checked into Nathan’s Villas, the first hostel I happened upon. Sitting in the lobby with the phone plugged in and typing on my Bluetooth keyboard (which tethers to the phone, I discovered only a day before the trip — now THIS changes everything) proved to be a talking point, and within 15 minutes, I’d made  three instafriends. The night, hot, then rainy, then fresh, was underway. Backpacker banter ensured. Good times, as the young people say.

In the morning there was a stoic, silent, tanned Japanese man about 50 years old in the breakfast room. Decked out in brightly coloured North Face-type garb, he prepared toast and jam like it was a tea ceremony, and then stared straight ahead as he ate while sipping from an insulated camping mug. He should have looked out of place but he didn’t, and noticing this cheered me greatly, and I thought to myself, fine, maybe I can keep doing this a few more years, too, at least now and then.

This trip reminded me how damned exciting the “people you meet” aspect of travel can be, and it made me sad to think how many years of it I’d foregone for one reason or another. If I could do my twenties over again, there’s no doubt I’d have more stamps in my passports and even more stories for my [posthumously published!] memoirs.

Bidding adieu this morning to my fellow travellers at Nathan’s, I flew LOT to Warsaw. There was no printer at Nathan’s so when I’d checked in online I opted for the “send boarding pass to mobile device” option. The QR-code on the iPhone screen couldn’t be read by the red laser scanner at the gate, as happens about half the time in my experience, so the one lady read the details off to the other lady and I got through just fine. The flight was swift but buzzy from the turboprop; the vibrations actually were strong enough to make The Killers’ Brandon Flowers’ voice stutter on my headphones. (BTW, has anyone else noticed that flight attendants are letting you listen to music during takeoff and landing nowadays, and going easy on the admonishments to switch your phone off before takeoff? I’m loving this apparent trend.)

Well…I’m going out now. Nighttime Warsaw. Dinner. And what else? Which brings me to my last and most important app recommendation for travellers: City Maps 2Go.

City Maps 2Go costs a buck or two and once you’ve installed it lets you download offline maps of a goodly number of the world’s cities. (A screen grab of the Lviv map, with my dropped pins, might be nearby if I’ve uploaded it correctly; I’m experimenting with WordPress mobile, since if I wait to write posts they usually never get written.)

Users of the built-in Google maps for mobile might at first be disappointed with City Maps 2Go, but stick with it. The “headlights” on the blue ball show you which direction you are facing (why doesn’t Google do this, or have I failed to toggle that feature?). Getting the lay of the land on the flight in (and what joy and advantage there is in preparing yourself for a place by engaging with the map before you visit), you can find points of interest already in the database or drop your own pins — as many as you’d wish, unlike the built-in map app — and label them; for instance, I put pins in for certain sights mentioned by the outstanding InYourPocket.com guides to Lviv and Krakow, the free PDF versions of which I’d downloaded to Drop Box and leafed through using PDF Expert.

The fact that you cannot query for directions or a route from point to point struck me at first as a bug and only later as a feature. In fact, this is brilliant, because it forces you to wander while at the same time making the wandering more efficient and thus more pleasurable. With City Maps 2Go, the only thing you know for sure is where you are, and even if you have a mind about where you’re going, you will need to make your own way there. Thus the emphasis shifts to the journey, to the exploration, which you can pursue as directly or circuitously as you wish. Since you’ve dropped your pins in advance to pre-map your territory, you’re still being purposeful. And yet you can’t get lost. You can only lose yourself.

That’s what I call travelling.

The new issue of the quarterly academic journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy includes a long article by me. The abstract reads:

Editor Simon Anholt asked Jeremy Hildreth for his ‘ big picture ’ thoughts on the state of the place branding field – where it is, and where it might be going.

This article employs many evocative metaphors to define and describe the benefits and hazards of place branding. The article takes the view that, broadly speaking, successful place branding results when certain mistakes are avoided and certain other challenges are imaginatively and thoughtfully resolved.

The article proposes a generic, narrative meta-model of place branding, which any place may refer to regardless of the present level of development of its product, perception or promotion. Some of the tools of place branding – including graphic design, advertising, marketing communications, architecture and exports – are explored. And mention is made of the innovations and refinements that are needed in the near future, including cross-fertilization of the place branding discipline with insights from such fields as evolutionary science.

The article concludes by likening the current state of place branding to an old map of the world, where the continents have all been discovered and are in the right places but some of the landmasses are misshapen and many are are still marked unexplored.

You’re welcome to download the full article for free here, HOWEVER, in order to keep within the bounds of the publisher’s [rather hidebound in my view] notion that posting the paper to a public website would discourage people from purchasing an expensive subscription to the journal (whereas I reckon a free sample would spur business, more than likely), to gain access to my lovely paper you’ll have to shoot me a quick email and I’ll send you the password.

These ads strike me as odd — and of limited effectiveness — because even if true, they’re not credible.

I have worked with Poland, I have been to Poland, and I live in London with about a zillion Poles. Over the last five years, I’ve had a few rather excellent Polish meals (the best of them involving chanterelle mushrooms). It’s hearty peasant stuff loaded with dill — fine if you’re in the mood, and you might be in the mood. But I would not say — and I have never heard anybody suggest, until these ads — that Polish food is one of the world’s great cuisines. No shame in this, but a fact’s a fact.

Now let’s suppose this fact is not a fact, and actually, Polish cuisine these days really is something special. Am I going to believe an ad that tells me something that directly contradicts my own perception, even if it is a misperception?

I might, but only if its conveyed to me with more artistry than this ad musters. Use a third party endorsement: tell me Jamie Oliver’s latest book is about Polish food, or that Warsaw has just gotten its sixth Michelin-starred restaurant. Or give me some facts that relate to a narrative I can tell myself about the Pole’s love of fine food — that even city-dwelling Poles can identify edible wild mushrooms, or that it was Poles who originally taught Belgians to make chocolate hundreds of years ago, or that there’s a new Polish fast-but-good-food chain specialising in gourmet pierogies (like a Polish version of Ping Pong, if you’re familiar with that establishment in Britain).

A last possible way of heading off a misperception is to acknowledge it outright, respect its presence heartily, and then declare it false or outdated. Say, in effect, “you’re not crazy to think this — no, no, not at all — but there is more to this story, you see.”

And consider not being earnest about it. Humour, and not taking yourself too seriously, is a sign of self-esteem and self-acceptance, which are attractive traits possessed by credible messengers; I feel like an amusing and fact-based ad that portrays Poles as eschewing borscht in favour of better, higher-brow stuff nowadays, might be more readily accepted than this straight, slick, and ultimately very standard CNN fare.

I guess it sounds like it would be an appealing marketing claim.

But it’s not. Period.

In fact, I’ll buy dinner for anybody who convinces me that he or she spent actual money (denominated in any currency) on a flight to a LAND OF CONTRASTS qua LAND OF CONTRASTS.

At the same time, I found a link to a talk I gave in Budapest in 2006 at a conference on national identity. The organisers posted the whole PowerPoint, including amusing — and instructive? let us hope so… — slides about marketing claims for places: “An introduction to robust national branding (including a case study about Poland)”.

My stump speech has progressed since then, but the fundamentals are well-described:

“The task,” I say, “is to work out what is special and interesting about Hungary and then convey that — visually, verbally, experientally — so that people understand Hungary and are attracted to it”.

That’s as good a definition of the process of place branding as any.

There I go again about logos....