Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? Read online

  “Rum, vodka, I don't care. I can barely see. What time is it anyways?”

  It is 3:25 a.m. according to his cell phone.

  The waitress comes to the table and the Doctor shouts, “A bottle of rum for me and my patient. . . . Can't you see that I'm desperately trying to save him from himself?”

  She nods and walks off. All business.

  The Doctor slouches forward, his neck barely able to support his head. “I'll take care of this. My . . . my . . . uh . . . my school loan is already $200K, so what're a few more bucks? Oh fuck, now I'm really gonna be . . . sick.”

  The bottle is listed as $200. There is a mandatory gratuity of 25 percent. As we don't look too trustworthy and it is approaching closing, they bring the check along with the bottle.

  The Doctor gives the waitress his credit card and goes to the bathroom to vomit some more. The lights start to come on in the bar, a faint glow at first. The waitress returns, flanked by a behemoth of a bouncer, to tell me that the card has been declined. I plead that they wait for my friend or let me go and find him in the bathroom, but there is no waiting or bargaining in this situation. I fork over my debit card and feel myself take one step closer to total financial ruin and becoming one of the old drunks at Bellevue Bar. I am performing without a net and have little room for error. The bouncer stands by our table while the waitress processes the transaction.

  The Doctor staggers back from the bathroom and puts on his sunglasses as the lights are turned up to full brightness. “Let's fuckin' go to Vinyl . . . no, OK, Shelter then,” he sputters and sways backward. I give him his worthless credit card and try to explain the situation with the bill, but he is no longer responsive. I pull off his sunglasses only to see his eyes tick back like an Atlantic City slot machine.

  The bouncers start to clear the club. There is no way in hell that I am going to part with a $250 bottle of rum ($18.99 at the liquor store). I slide it into my pants, tighten my belt so that it holds the neck of the bottle in place, and walk out the front entrance. Within five minutes, the Doctor is forcefully ejected from a side door by one of the bouncers.

  I yell at him while he gets back to his feet, though I may as well be shouting at the fire hydrant next to me or the brick wall behind us. He looks through me as if he is staring at some vanishing point down the street. “I didn't think that it was going to come to this, but we are going to have to take drastic measures,” he drools. And with that he lobs a sloppy punch into my Adam's apple.

  Adrenaline courses through my scalp, the tips of my fingers and toes. It concentrates in a ball of seething, brilliant anger in the core of my chest. I transform into a frothing Scandinavian berserker, unstoppable in my rage. My anger, exacerbated by everything from my career shortcomings to my relationship shortcomings to the fact that the Sonics can't sign a decent center is channeled out through the points of my fists and into the Doctor's big, curly blond head.

  He doesn't take it sitting down. Nearly a dozen punches are exchanged and we both take a solid beating. The punches are not the crisp cracks of television and the movies, but dull, meaty thuds of bone on flesh and bone on bone. The bottle is dropped and shatters into heavy shards. I land two clean hooks to his head—even a left jab that has been polished in my fantasy beating of my former boss Allen. The Doctor drops on his side and then rolls onto his back. Although prostrate, he continues to swear at me. I stand over him, fists clenched, in an expanding pool of spilt rum.

  I don't want to see how much lower this situation can go and am more than satisfied to recognize this as the bottom. I start to walk off; I have a flight to catch. The Doctor is suddenly back on his feet and chasing me. I run. I run like I used to run when the cops were chasing us at high school keg parties or when, as kids, my friend Greg and I would hit some frustrated middle-aged man's car with snowballs. After a block or two, I look back and the Doctor is nowhere to be seen. It's better this way, better to end this before something really bad happens.

  I wake up facedown on my floor with sticky brown liquid all over my ears, cheeks, and nose. It is spread around me on the floor. I am relieved to find an empty quart of chocolate milk in my right hand. It is the low-sugar, organic, low-fat stuff. Regular chocolate milk is so bad for you.

  After gathering enough composure to walk across the street to the pay phone, I call the limo service of my former employer. “Yes, we're gonna need a stretch for this occasion, yes, with a full bar.” “Yeah, my name's Dan Fielding, Esquire, yes, F-I-E-L-D-I-N-G, account number 7-7-7-5-2-4.” “I'm new to the firm, this is the first time that I've used your service. . . . Yeah, that's why I'm not in the database.” “No, this isn't my office number. . . . No, it's not a cell number either. I am on a special errand, undercover, for the head of the firm, for national security. . . . No, don't pick me up at the office, pick me up on the corner of Houston and Avenue C in an hour.”

  The driver is hesitant to let me in when he finds a drunken, tattered, black-and-blue kid smelling faintly of sour milk with nothing more than a backpack standing on the street corner, but he doesn't ask too many questions as the firm's account is legitimate. I try to convince the driver to have a drink with me, but he declines. It is against his religion.

  A Vicodin chased with a fresh beverage take the edge off of my surging hangover and the edge off of my consciousness. I watch the cool, gray morning sun as we pass over the Williams-burg Bridge and head across Brooklyn.

  While waiting for my flight at JFK, I want to call Sydney, but opt instead to call the Doctor to see if he has sobered up. He answers his phone with an odd mixture of merriment and shock, “Dude, I'm in the hospital right now, I've only got a second to talk.”

  “I didn't know that you had to work today.”

  “No, man, I'm in the hospital. I'm in the fucking ER . . . as a patient.”

  “I didn't beat you up that bad, did I?”

  “You beat me up? Really? Somehow, I almost severed my thumb.”

  He doesn't remember anything. Was it the broken bottle, a knife fight, sewer rats, razor wire, simply tripping while chasing me down the street? We'll never know. He doesn't blame me quite yet.

  My boats have all been run aground and I can't say that I feel any sense of accomplishment. Maybe people need social structure and support. Have I been romanticizing my need to escape my own poor choices? Maybe we need to live within societal norms as they're really in our best interest. I should probably set up shop in some nice town, get a nice job, and surround myself with nice friends and a nice girlfriend and have a nice life.

  I stare down the long carpeted hallway at JFK, everyone in transit, everyone in a liminal zone, walking in ones and sometimes twos: heading home, heading abroad.

  I am terrified. I am exhilarated. I am unfettered.

  Detoured

  60 DAYS UNTIL DEADLINE

  Although I have no idea what I am to be doing for this guidebook, I am not new to international travel or the world of backpacking. My parents were obsessed with travel and they journeyed around the world for two and a half years shortly after getting married, in 1967. Years later in Seattle, when my mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a photographer employed by the University of Washington, they both had some flexibility over the summers. They would take my brother, James, and me traveling for part, if not all, of it.

  We lived modestly at the north end of University District where it transitions into Lake City, a shabbier area consisting mainly of used-car dealerships and self-storage units. We were the last family I knew to still have a black-and-white TV and the four of us tooled around in an orange VW camper van with Lone Ranger and Japanese robot puffy stickers covering the side windows. We were not poor, but we were not wealthy by any means. Regardless, my parents always found a way to take my brother and me on the road. As far back as I can remember, we took summerlong overland trips up and across Canada or through Europe, and we even popped into North Africa a few times. We traveled by car, boat, train, and camel—traipsing through Morocca
n kasbahs, bunking in Swiss mountain hostels, camping along the Mediterranean, and renting houses in crumbling Croatian fishing villages.

  I first traveled by myself at the age of seventeen. I worked at the Folklore Festival of the Pyrenees in Jaca, Spain—a few miles from the French border. I lived in a narrow hostel room with three roommates: a guitar-strumming Spaniard named Carlos who was stopping through as a pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago; another Spaniard, Diego, who was a die-hard Morrissey fan with the telltale hairstyle, and who insisted on taking his siesta naked and had his mother wax his armpits for him; and Josef from Munich, a lively, ponytailed Bavarian who was traveling around Spain in a Ghostbusters-esque 1960s Mercedes ambulance. It was gutted and refurbished with futons and posters of Buju Banton and Claudia Schiffer and stacked with mountain bikes and sail boards.

  My job, as an official volunteer at the Folklore Festival of the Pyrenees, was to translate the daily schedule of festival events into English and read it live over the city-wide speaker system. The sound equipment was in a minivan parked on the side of the Plaza Mayor. The first day, I read, “Today at nine a.m. in Plaza Mayor there will be a mariachi group representing Mexico, followed by a Scottish bagpipe band at ten, drummers from Ghana . . .” in my best professional-announcer voice. I was fine until I looked out the window of the minivan and saw people stopping on the street, craning their necks to hear the bizarre, foreign voice broadcasting from the black loudspeakers. I completely lost my cool, choked my words, and had to apologize and start over again with sweaty, trembling hands.

  In time, the job got easier, my Spanish improved dramatically, and I made some enduring friendships. Evenings were filled with raucous parties with people from all over the world followed by sangria in tiny bodegas, breakfast at sunrise, and then bed for a few hours before returning to work. At the end of the summer, I traveled in the ambulance across Spain with Josef, a French girl named Anne, a Hungarian named Erika, and another Bavarian friend named Susanne. We stopped in small medieval towns and camped outside of Barcelona. Needless to say, after that summer it was difficult to return to American high school, with its underage-drinking laws and crowds of adolescents huddling around clandestine kegs of Milwaukee's Best. Something had changed in me—permanently.

  After my junior year of college, I found myself at a crossroads. I had traveled every moment that I could afford to since being in Spain. I had studied abroad in Buenos Aires for a semester, and that was to be my last hurrah before launching into a sensible career. I was majoring in Government and Legal Studies, had just nailed a strong A in Constitutional Law I, and had lined up a law internship in the Bay Area. I was ready to go ahead with it when I heard about a position working as a guide for American high school students doing some sort of summer volunteer work in Latin America.

  There was almost no pay or obvious next career step, but there was a free flight included and I could stay in-country after the students returned home. It wasn't a purely selfless undertaking on the students' part or mine—most of the kids wanted to be able to claim some sort of community service in their college applications. I wanted to continue to travel.

  An entire book could be written about my experiences as a guide and group leader over the following three summers working in Costa Rica and Ecuador. In any case, I ended up even farther away from the sensible career choice that I had once imagined. I continued to link one trip into the next, with only short respites to visit my family and try to earn extra money in order to travel more.

  I found that I excelled as a traveler. I was a natural, of sorts. Maybe such a skill is only about as useful in “the real world,” the career world, as being a good drinker or good in bed, but it was something that came easily to me, and that I was proud of, nonetheless.

  The conversion from guide and road warrior to the embryonic early form of travel writer was serendipitous and sudden. I was in India staying with a family for a month and visiting my brother, who was at the time an exchange student studying Archaeology in the southern city of Madurai. I lived with a kindly octogenarian couple. The diminutive man, who stood no more than five foot five, had been the regional director of animal husbandry and would regale me with stories of performing surgery on bull elephants with no anesthetic. Everything was great about the family, except that they went to bed at 8:30 p.m. and padlocked all of the gates to the house by 8. My natural bedtime falls somewhere between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m., so I ended up with an unusual amount of free time on my hands. There was nothing more than a single lamp and a bed in my room. I had three books to my name: Lonely Planet India, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Beach. I read each cover to cover—a few times. I stayed up and smoked joints rolled in emptied-out beedies and imagined what would happen in the limitless future.

  While flipping though the publishing list in the back of Lonely Planet India, I noticed that they had only a single phrase-book for all Latin American Spanish. After my time in Costa Rica, I knew that Central American Spanish and, say, Argentinean Spanish were practically different languages. I came up with the idea to write a phrasebook specific to Costa Rican Spanish (complete with surfing, dating, and partying terminology). I had no big ambitions for the phrasebook; I even thought to do it as an add-on section to the Costa Rica guidebook. My honest aim was only to scrape together enough money to go on another trip or two before finding that eventual, elusive career or maybe going to graduate school. I contacted Lonely Planet through their customer service email and, within a matter of weeks, sold them the book from an Internet café in Tamil Nadu. I had just turned twenty-three.

  Timing was a huge part of the sale. It was 1998. We didn't finalize the contract until early 1999 and I worked on it on and off through the spring of 2000. The economy boomed in those years. People had lots of disposable income and travel guidebook publishers couldn't turn out books fast enough. Costa Rica was taking off as a destination at that time, evolving from a place visited by surfers and biologists to the go-to American tourism spot in Central America. I believe that if I were to send a similar email to the customer service department these days, I probably wouldn't even receive a response, let alone a book deal.

  But back then Lonely Planet was a raw, growing, and evolving company. It was bursting with ideas and possibilities, but also appeared to be bloated and inefficient—a clumsy teenager not yet in full command of its newfound size and bulk. It still held onto its alternative and gutsy persona of its early years, but was clearly no longer a mom-and-pop business. While I declined to write a translation for the suggested Where can I find a methadone clinic?, they insisted that the book carry translations for phrases like:

  Do you sell syringes?

  I take (cocaine) occasionally.

  Please don't stop!

  You can't sleep here tonight.

  The whole project suffered from maddening inefficiencies, miscommunication with the editors in Australia, slow payment, and arcane formatting systems. Manually alphabetizing a dictionary was one of the most tedious things I've had to do thus far in my life.

  In spite of such issues, the book became a big success. “A punt pays off” was the title of a celebratory email regarding the book that the editor later copied me on. In the fall of 2000, Lonely Planet gave me the opportunity to move from phrase-books to guidebooks, but I had already started a master's degree program in Latin American Studies at Stanford. The U.S. Department of Education offered me a full fellowship, plus living allowance, so long as I studied Portuguese. Travel writing was deemed a fleeting youthful dalliance and I opted to push ahead with academia and eventually move into the adult career world.

  Some months before I left for Brazil, while avoiding the work that I needed to do for my favorite vulture investors and crooked research analyst, I fired off an email to Lonely Planet, saying that I would potentially be interested in doing some writing on the side. It was not much of a serious thought, more like an escapist fantasy. I had forgotten that I had even contacted them when I got a random call from thei
r Australian office suggesting that I knock out a sample chapter to see if I was capable of writing for their guidebooks. I spent a few evenings writing about my neighborhood, Alphabet City, made sure that the sample was under the word limit, and sent it off. I was later told that the sample passed muster, but it was some time before I would hear from them again. Then, suddenly, I received the Brazil offer and was looking at a couple of weeks to upend and change my entire life.

  In order to prepare myself for this new, half-cocked career choice, I began to read a selection of contemporary travel literature. It was something that I felt like I was supposed to do: research material to properly build inspiration. I must have read or skimmed about two dozen different books, and I have to admit that most didn't do anything for me. The majority of travel books fall into three basic groups:

  1. There are the earnest writers who become enlightened through contact with the simple, honest lives of Mexican peasants or the unparalleled tranquillity of the Tuscan countryside. A more holistic approach to life is discovered and the universe is balanced. In order to properly enjoy such writing, one should be dressed in an eco-print Polarfleece, drinking fair-trade coffee and relaxing to a Putumayo world music CD.

  2. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the smug writers who mock how backward plumbing and transportation are anywhere outside of North America. Those foreigners are so whacky and their toilets are, too! Isn't that hilarious? With a veneer of foreign exoticism, fourth-grade bathroom humor and petty prejudices are given a new lease on their comedic lives. Such writers should give Orlando or Long Island a try for their next vacation, as both have abundant new cars and functional flush toilets with soft two-ply paper.