Monday, May 12, 2008
Lonely Planet's new anthology presents an I'm-glad-that-wasn't-me collection of delightful disasters.
Oct 13, 1999 | If you ever find yourself in a room full of travelers, one of the most entertaining questions you can ask is, "What's the worst thing that's ever happened to you on the road?" One simple question, and your night is made.
The guidebook writer, of course, is a special subset of the traveler category. And the off-
Real-world Indiana Joneses, they venture where few have gone before in search of the fabled four-toed factoid, the village with no name, the hostel of the all-night cockroaches, the path not yet taken.
What a glamorous life, we think. Their job is to visit some interesting place, stay in its hotels, eat in its restaurants, visit its museums and ruins, check out its hippest cafes and most obscure villages -- all the things we love to do when we travel, anyway. And they get paid to do this. What could be better?
The glamour of this guidebook writer's life is mostly illusion, of course, but it's one of those illusions we cherish and sustain because we need it. We want to believe that, even at this very moment, someone is slashing through sinewy vines to stumble upon a forgotten stone temple, or settling blissfully into a $2-a-night hut on a sandy beach that stretches forever.
But it ain't all mango smoothies and banana pancakes. Ask a few former guidebook writers and you'll soon hear the other side of the story. As Salon staffer Dawn MacKeen, who wrote the Greece section of the original Berkeley Guides book on Europe, wrote last year:
With a $35 daily stipend, I couldn't exactly hire an army to aid me in scouting out the streets, pensions and ruins, so I dipped into my own pockets to take the twice-as-fast hydrofoils instead of the slow-moving ferries, rented motorbikes instead of relying on the undependable, time-consuming bus system, went on dates with locals to ferret out recommendations from them and arrived alone in the dead of night in strange places (without a room to sleep in) so I could keep up with my editor's schedule. I even went back to work within an hour of crashing on a motor scooter -- despite the fact that I could barely walk. But no matter how hard I tried, it was never enough ...Unfortunately, the circumstances I worked under -- the tight deadlines, the superficial method of information gathering, the financial restrictions -- are almost a guidebook industry standard.
And even if you survive the penurious pocketbooks and drop-dead deadlines, the world has its own way of throwing perverse wrenches into your well-oiled travel engine.
Lonely Planet -- the globe-girdling publisher that has facilitated more than its fair share of guidebook-writer misadventures -- celebrates its road-stained wretches in the hot-
Get Salon in your mailbox!