Thompson - Smile when youre lying: confessions of a rogue travel writer

After somewhere between ten and fifteen visits, this is my favorite anecdote from Bangkok. Every word true.

Were in a small, dark bar, an Aussie expat hangout. Across the table is my good friend Shanghai Bob, American expat and Old Asia Hand of distinguished order. To the right, a pair of astonishingly wasted guys in ridiculous bush hats (are there any other kind?) are sparking up what is certainly not the first joint of the evening. To the left, a young Thai girl is giving a rapid-fire, beneath-the-table hand job to a poker-faced German. Throughout the event, the German swigs his beer with a nonchalance that suggests hes back in Bielefeld with his loving Schnuckelputz and adorable rug rats Klaus and Liesl frolicking at his feet.

The German looks like hes in for the long haul and sometime during the girls indefatigable ministrations a door opens near the rear of the bar. Out spills a porcine gent, half a century old if hes a day, accompanied by a slightly disheveled teenager modestly hitching up her bright orange halter top. Behind the door one can see into a narrow room, the primary features of which are a naked lightbulb swinging from the ceiling and a stained mattress on the floor.

Its at this point that Shanghai Bob looks at me and says, with utter sincerity, with complete lack of irony, You want to get another beer here or go someplace kind of sleazy?

Though Ive spent the last decade writing about travel for national magazines, this is the first time one of my priceless Shanghai Bob anecdotes has ever appeared in print. If youre surprised that a veteran of the travel trade wouldnt have exploited this sort of golden material more often, its probably because you dont possess the keen insight that enables you to determine instantly that stories about colorful Aussies in bush hats surrounded by drugs, booze, and Thai whores (to say nothing of Shanghai Bobs) are considered absolutely off-limits by all but a handful of travel publications. Whereas stories about colorful Aussies sporting bush hats and delightful accents, surrounded by koalas and roos, and perhaps sipping one genteel glass of Fostersenjoyed at sunset overlooking the enchanting opera house on the last perfect day of your magical visit to Sydneyare considered absolutely on the money.

This book is for those who understand that, no matter what they read in the travel press, no matter what they expect to encounter once they plunge into the Byzantine world of international tourism, theres nothing genteel, ever, about Fosters, bush hats, or Australian accents. And that even koalas will bite when properly provoked.

In 1995, nontravel writer Sallie Tisdale wrote an incendiary article titled, Never Let the Locals See Your Map: Why Most Travel Writers Should Stay Home. Published in Harpers , the piece was an unsparing evisceration of the travel-writing racket. The modern reader, Tisdale wrote, has the misfortune of living in a time when travel literature is booming and good travel writers are few and far between. Warming up to her theme, Tisdale proceeded to savage travel writers as self-important nihilists who put themselves at the center of their stories, ignored anything of genuine interest to readers, and contrived trips taken largely to be written about, to create stories where none existed before.

With her arch tone and unsympathetic opinions, Tisdale upset a fair number of people in the travel industry, but her story was of particular interest to me inasmuch as it was published at roughly the time I was stumbling into the business. A magazine had flown me to New York to produce a feel-good feature on a group of Russian classical musicians whod fled the chaos of Moscow and formed a successful orchestra in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. While I was in New York, the magazine asked me to drop by the newly opened Rose Museum inside Carnegie Hall, as well as a highly regarded Indian restaurant somewhere in the East Village. I wrote a feature about the musicians and short blurbs on the museum and restaurant. The magazine ended up liking the blurbs more than the feature. Would I have any interest, they asked, in reviewing a recently remodeled four-star restaurant in Toronto?

Since then, Ive traveled on assignment in more than thirty-five countries, written two guidebooks, edited two others, worked as an editor at four magazinesincluding a year as editor in chief of Travelocity.com s short-lived newsstand magazine, at the end of which I was drop-kicked out the doorand been involved as writer, editor, or photographer in a conservative count of two thousand travel stories. Ive hunkered down with airline execs, watched marketing campaigns being slicked up, looked behind the curtains of some of the worlds largest airports, schmoozed with resort managers, and been badgered by publicists to produce reams of favorable copy. In other words, Ive watched the travel world spin from more angles than most people know it has. Travel writing has changed in the decade or so since Tisdales attempted wake-up call. But not for the better. Bright patches excepted, its instead settled into a period of weary decline.

The point was driven home some years back by a University of Pennsylvaniasponsored travel-writing conference. Bright-eyed hopefuls expecting to attend edifying lectures, hear war stories from industry heavyweights, make contacts, and generally advance their careers were treated instead to lectures from several presentersBritish author Colin Thubron, travel editors from newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer who expressed the opinion that most travel writers were not talented enough to write for real publications. They were press junketeers, starved of original thought, incapable of ending any sentence without a phone number, Web address, or other transparent plug for whatever tourist board happened to be picking up the tab for their latest vacationtalentless freeloaders who inhabited the last refuge of the hack from which they produced journalistic tiramisu. From a convention of Mississippi Baptists mulling over gay marriage, OK. But its not a good sign for your profession when this sort of vitriol comes out of a gathering of peers presumably intended to profit those in attendance.

If the concept of journalistic tiramisu seems vague, pick up any travel magazine and flip through the pages. I recently did just this at the Safeway down the street from my house. Thinking I might need five or ten minutes to find some genuine turd of an example, I picked up a basket at the door and tossed in a bag of chips and some apples, just so I wouldnt look like one of those social deviants for whom they post the Do Not Read the Magazines! sign.

I neednt have worried. I hit tiramisu pay dirt with the first magazine I lifted off the shelf, a special issue of Outside devoted to travel. Opening to a random page, heres the first piece of copy that caught my eye:

Renaissance funhogs, brace yourselves: This trip, combining three days of mountain biking with five days of whitewater rafting on the Colorado River, may be the tastiest pairing since chocolate and cabernet. It takes you straight into the heart of Canyonlands high-desert rock garden, defined by the goose-necking canyons of Green and Colorado rivers and an almost hallucinogenic symphony of spires, buttes, mesas, hoodoos, fins, arches, and slickrock.