Kohnstamm - Do travel writers go to hell?: a swashbuckling tale of high adventures, questionable ethics, and professional hedonism

Contents

PARA MEU AMOR, TBATA 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 CLINE,
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 BOLAO,
Last Evenings on Earth

INTRODUCTION

Predeparture

M y 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 stablebut 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 expos 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?