Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Author's Note
Epigraph
Map
INTRODUCTION: Predeparture
1 One in the Hand, Two in the Bush
2 Turbulence
3 Detoured
4 According to Plan
5 A Day in the Life
6 The Gringo Trail
7 The Low Road
8 Disposable Travel Writers
9 The Hustle
10 Dream Job
11 Paid Vacation
12 Gateway Substance
EPILOGUE: Performance Anxiety
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
PARA MEU AMOR, TÁBATA SILVA
Author's Note
For better or for worse, this book recounts true experiences. In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology, and combine a few of the characters. I have changed most of the names and identifying details of the characters in this book to protect their privacy. Much of the dialogue and many emails have been re-created, but all are based on real conversations and correspondence.
I'd seen too many puzzling things
to be easy in my mind.
I knew too much
and not enough.
LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE,
Journey to the End of the Night
Sound crazy? Well it isn't.
The ends justify the means; that's the system.
ICE-T,
New Jack Hustler
Life is mysterious
as well as vulgar.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO,
Last Evenings on Earth
INTRODUCTION
Predeparture
My name is Thomas. For as long as I can remember, travel has been a part of my life.
Over the years, I've tried to fight it and to break the hold that it has over me. I have made numerous attempts to return to civilian life: to get a job, a home, open a savings account, invest time or emotion or money in something stable—but the road has always pulled me back in. I have never owned a car or a television, or purchased a significant piece of furniture.
At a certain point, I recognized that I was powerless in the face of my travel addiction and did the best thing that I could do under the circumstances: I went pro.
This book is about that conversion. It chronicles the events that took me from bourgeois working stiff with a repressed travel habit to a full-time mercenary travel hack, with all of the good, bad, and surreal that it entails. This is not a sunny look at some dream job, but an unvarnished examination of what it really means to be a professional travel writer scratching out an income in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is the true story of the life as I have experienced it and the effect that it has on the travel information that makes it into the readers' hands.
Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: I am not some resentful burnout who is trying to settle scores or slight those who would not hire him. I have (almost) made ends meet as a professional travel writer and have enjoyed positive working relationships with numerous editors and publishers. I've written country guidebooks, regional guidebooks, city guidebooks, phrasebooks, Internet travel content, travel essays, and both magazine and newspaper pieces. I've also done publicity work, interviews, and speaking engagements for travel publishers. I've packed more into recent years of my life than would have been imaginable with any other career. I've spent weeks on yachts for free; been comped hotel rooms, meals, astronomical bar tabs, ski passes, paragliding classes, and scuba diving trips. I've drunk Scotch and eaten salmon carpaccio with the ministers of tourism of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, and spent the night with more exotic, fetching ladies than the average man deserves. I have also made remarkable friends in the process, some of whom you'll meet in this book.
Regardless, this book is not a polite evaluation of the job or the lifestyle and probably won't do me any favors in the industry. I imagine that stories of sex, drugs, excessive ridiculousness, scams, schemes, fistfights, drunken debauchery, police altercations, and general nihilistic selfishness probably won't sit well with the powers-that-be. While I may push things further than most travel writers, I know of many others who have experienced the same trials and dilemmas to varying degrees. We all do. But, up to now, no one has given voice to the everyday life of the gritty miners of travel information, those who dig up the material that is then polished and sold to consumers as Travel Gospel. No one has talked about the roguish misfits out there with years' worth of nights logged in dingy hostels, pounding the pavement from bars to restaurants to nightclubs and back, doing their best to be, or pretend to be, experts on everything going around them. It has also been my experience that the editors, who are our closest work companions, don't really know how we do what we do. Maybe they don't want to know.
This book is not intended to be an exposé and it is not intended to discourage the purchase or use of travel guidebooks. I almost always take a guidebook with me when I travel, and it invariably helps me in some way that makes it worth its price and worth its weight in my pack. It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries. Maybe if people see what arbitrary bullshit goes into the making of a guidebook, they will realize that it is just a loose tool to give basic information and is not the singular or necessarily the correct way to approach a destination.
So, travel writing, like any job, has its issues. However, travel writing is particularly disorienting since you are expected to work in a tourist environment that is built for pleasure. You must find a way to make yourself effective in that peculiar limbo between work and play. I imagine that the difference between traveling and professional travel writing is like the difference between having sex and working in pornography. While both are still probably fun, being a professional brings many levels of complication to your original interest and will eventually consume your personal life.
We travel writers live in perpetual motion. Relationships are transitory and fleeting. Friendships, even more so. Home is where you are on a given night. It is at once glamorous and pathetic, exciting and perversely routine. The longer you do it, the harder it is to return to normal life, and one day you wake up and realize that the road is your permanent address. There's no going back. This is the life that I have led, and this book recounts the beginning of that story.
I will pose the question to you: Do travel writers go to hell? Do the impossible projects and deadlines we're assigned and the dismal living conditions we face seem unbearable? Do our actions, often corrupt and selfish in the face of a trusting readership, qualify us for eternal damnation?
You may find some answers in these pages. If you do, I'll let you be the judge.
SEATTLE
AUGUST 2007
Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
One in the Hand,
Two in the Bush
Roebling.
Roe-bleeeng.
Rrrrroe-bling.
Alone in the fifty-seventh-floor conference room, I repeat the mantra under my breath. I sit in a rigid half-lotus position atop the glass table and watch the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge flicker against the night sky. The office air is sharp with disinfectant. I take a slug of rum and return to my mantra.
John Roebling had a calling. Unfortunately for him, after the buildup, design, preparation, and politick
ing for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the hapless bastard promptly dropped dead. His son, Washington, brought the bridge to completion, but not without picking up a case of the bends and almost dying in the process. Neither man ever wavered from a life of dedication, direction, and diligence.
A lot of good it did either of them.
I remove my battered leather shoes, the toes stained gray with salt from the slushy city sidewalks, and knead my left foot through my sweaty dress sock. Hundreds of pairs of headlights move in a stream back and forth across the bridge.
Yesterday during a meeting in this same conference room, a neckless, pockmarked banker pointed out that the name the bends was, in fact, coined during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hundreds of laborers toiled on the footing of the bridge, eighty feet below the surface of the river. They worked in nine-foot-high wooden boxes known as caissons, which were pumped full of compressed air and lowered to the depths with the men inside. After resurfacing, scores of workers were inflicted with a mysterious illness. Crippling joint pain. Mental deterioration. Paralysis. And for a few, agonizing death. The name the bends was taken from the debilitated posture of the sufferers.
It wasn't until eight years after the bridge construction had started that a French physiologist determined the cause of the illness. Contrary to popular assumption, oxygen is a lesser ingredient in the air that we breathe. Seventy-eight percent of air is comprised of nitrogen, which, under normal circumstances, has no effect on the human body. When breathing air at depth, the water pressure converts the nitrogen in the bloodstream from a gas to a liquid, washing it through the veins and arteries. So long as you resurface at a slow pace, the liquid gradually transforms back into a gas and is disposed of by your body.
If the change of pressure is too sudden, the liquid bursts out of solution, fizzing back into gas. Similar to the millions of microscopic nitrogen bubbles that are released when you crack a can of Guinness, the bubbles surge through the bloodstream. If they don't lodge themselves in your joints, the bubbles charge on the fatal path to your brain. You come up too quickly, you die.
I remove a folded piece of printer paper from my pocket and smooth it open:
Thomas,
I want to know if you'd like do some writing for our new Brazil guidebook?
If you're interested in jumping ship within the next few weeks for Brazil, let me know right away and I could put together an offer for you.
_________ _________
Commissioning Editor—South America & Antarctica Lonely Planet
Once—maybe when I was first out of school—this opportunity would have been a dream job. It is still seductive, but more along the lines of a cheap one-night-stand. My life is fulfilling in other ways now. I have a steady job, a decent income, a beautiful girlfriend, and an apartment in Manhattan. I finally have everything that I am supposed to have. Besides, between 9/11, SARS, Iraq, Bali, and Madrid, it can't possibly be a good time to dive headfirst into travel writing. But I won't I lie: I have always been a sucker for a cheap one-night-stand.
God knows, I can already feel myself coming up too fast.
For most people, November 24 is not a special day. Sure, it hosts Thanksgiving every few years, but I could care less about that. In Seattle, where few things out-of-the-ordinary ever happen and where people strive, often pathologically, to maintain a façade of tranquillity, the day has a different significance.
On November 24, 1971, a balding, middle-aged man boarded a flight from Portland to Seattle. He used the name Dan Cooper. He dressed in a black suit, a black overcoat, black sunglasses, and a narrow black tie with a pearl stick pin. Cooper hijacked the Boeing 727 with a briefcase full of wires and bright red cylinders. The hostages were exchanged for four parachutes and two hundred thousand dollars at Sea-Tac Airport (to put that in perspective, the average cost of a new home in the U.S. in 1971 was $28,000).
DB Cooper, as the press mistakenly dubbed him, demanded to be flown to Mexico. He parachuted out of the plane somewhere over southern Washington State and disappeared. Maybe DB died in the jump. Maybe he got away with the money. Nobody knows. But legend has it that DB was a man so disenchanted with his life that he gambled it all on a way out. The point isn't whether he made it or not. The point is that this little bald man didn't spend one more day pumping gas in Tallahassee or adjusting claims in Denver. He didn't waste one more day wondering, “What if?”
I nominate Cooper as the patron saint of disillusioned men, particularly those who, like me, were born in Seattle on November 24.
The phone rings in the conference room. It is the blipping staccato ring of all office phones. I am jolted back to the reality that I have hours of work ahead of me. The digital clock on the phone reads 9:42 p.m.
Tucking the pint bottle of rum into the waist of my pants, I answer with a cautious “Hello.”
“Thomas? WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM, DAMMIT. I knew I could find you there. You and I need to have a talk,” my boss snarls. “I am coming by your cube in fifteen minutes. You'd better be there, with the WorldCom spreadsheet ready for me to look at.”
I tiptoe back into my cubicle, successfully avoiding anyone in the hallways. I hold my head in my hands, shirt sleeves rolled up, with cold sweat dripping down my sides. My tacky palms are crisscrossed with hairs from my suddenly receding hairline. After the final sip of a metallic-sweet Red Bull, I chew a handful of gum and look across the tops of the cubicles, scanning for other workers. The office appears empty, except for the faint tapping of keyboards somewhere down the hall.
Welcome to life on Wall Street. With such a character-defining foothold in the career world, I no longer have to make excuses for the life I lead. No longer do I have to explain my directionless postcollegiate life to incredulous eyes and repetitive questions, like: “What are you doing next year?” “Don't you want to do something with your life?” and my favorite, “When are you going to get a real job?” I am no longer just Thomas, the supposed slacker, backpacker bum, or permanent student. I am Thomas, the employee of ______, ______, ______ & ______ LLP, and I am going places.
I make more money than I reasonably should, putting papers into chronological order (chroning, in office-speak). My skill set also includes entering numbers into Excel spreadsheets and working the copier and fax machine. Between those projects, I search for old high school friends' names on Google; play online Jeopardy against my office trivia nemesis, Jerry; and generally while away the hours of my life. Jerry thinks that he is better at Jeopardy than me, but really he's just faster with the mouse.
Yes, I know, I really have it pretty good. There are people starving in Africa. And there are plenty of people here in New York who would love the chance to be in a cubicle all day and not have to operate deep-fat fryers, drive garbage trucks, suck dicks, or whatever it is they do. The problem is that I am an ungrateful by-product of a prosperous society—the offal of opportunity. I am just another liberal arts graduate who bought the idea that life and career would be a fulfilling intellectual journey. Unfortunately, I am performing a glorified version of punching the time clock, and the financial rewards don't come anywhere near filling the emotional void of such diminished expectations.
But let's face it: rebellion is passé. My parents' generation already proved that—over time—rebellion boils down to little more than Saab ownership and an annual contribution to public radio. The old icons have been co-opted. José Martí is a brand of mojito mix. Che Guevara is a T-shirt. Cherokees are SUVs, and Apaches are helicopter gunships.
The American Dream is for immigrants. The rest of us are better acquainted with entitlement or boredom than we are with our own survival mechanisms. And when confronted with a fight-or-flight scenario, the latter usually takes precedence. Escape is our action of choice: escape through pharmaceuticals, escape through technology, and plain old running away in search of something else, anything else. I rummage through the back of my desk drawer looking for a loose Vicodin or a Klonopin. T
he best thing I come up with is Wite-Out, but I'm not that desperate. Yet.
I continually revisit the words of some sociologist who I read in college. I think that it was Weber or Durkheim. Either is usually a fair guess. He believed that the modern mind is determined to expand its repertoire of experiences, and is bent on avoiding any specialization that threatens to interrupt the search for alternatives and novelty. Many people would call that approach to life a crisis, immaturity, or being out of touch with reality. It could also be called the New American Dream. Fuck the simple pursuit of financial stability. Here's to finding fulfillment in novelty, excitement, adventure, and autonomy.
Following the cue of one of our office team-building exercises, I come up with the following life goals and painstakingly write them out on Day-Glo yellow Post-it notes:
One by one, I stick the notes around the edge of my computer monitor. All evenly spaced. They're not the clear career objectives of a John Roebling, but for me, they'll have to do.
My desk phone rings.
“Yes?”
“She found you, huh? I heard you sneaking back to your desk,” says Anna. Though she is only two years out of Dart mouth, Anna has a mature professional edge. She is invariably the last person to leave the office at night and goes about her tasks with pleasure, frequently asking for more work. Her try-hard humor and enthusiastic friendliness have inspired suspicion in our more acerbic and cynical co-workers. Anna and I couldn't be more different as employees, but have the camaraderie of workplace outcasts.
“Yuck. I'm happy that it's you and not me who's working for Marilyn. I can't stand that cuckoo,” Anna offers.
“Marilyn's just having another personal crisis. Unfortunately, as her assistant, I'm a reservoir tip for her self-loathing.” I would like to give Marilyn the benefit of the doubt. She once worked for the National Organization for Women, but soon tired of surviving on a pittance and now occupies her waking hours as legal defense for well-known misogynists and womanizers—misogynists and womanizers with their hands in very lucrative business.