A travel writer's life is less romance than trudging and taking note upon note upon note. Tim Richards reveals the unglamorous reality of updating a Lonely Planet guide.
This time last year, trudging across the cobblestones of Poland’s historic cities, I had Thomas Kohnstamm’s book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? on my mind.
Kohnstamm was the former Lonely Planet (LP) author who ’fessed up to accepting freebies on assignment against LP rules, and partaking of a lot of sex and drugs while updating a chapter on north-eastern Brazil.
As a member of the prominent travel publisher’s author pool (the vast majority of LP authors are freelancers), I was keen to compare Kohnstamm’s account with my own experiences. After making allowances for the florid writing style, much of his account seemed familiar; particularly the mental and physical exhaustion that sets in after weeks on the guidebook research road.
On the other hand, my own experiences in updating Poland for the Eastern Europe and Poland guidebooks seemed to lack the author’s (possibly fanciful) tales of debauchery. Maybe it’s the difference between travelling in Brazil and travelling in Poland, but I don’t stumble across plentiful offers of sex and drugs while in Central Europe. Complimentary lard dips before a meal, yes; quickies in the back of a Warsaw restauracja, no. But I do agree that being on a research assignment for a guidebook publisher is exhausting work and that no-one, not even the LP staff back in the office, realises how exhausting.
This was an average Lonely Planet research day in Poland, updating the Eastern Europe guide in 2008:
6am: Alarm on PDA wakes me up. Get ready for the day, organise notes, clipboard, map and camera while torturing myself with the only English-language cable news channel available (“No more CNN! Nooooo!”).
7am: Hotel breakfast. If lucky, a nice buffet spread of luncheon meats, cheeses, herring, scrambled eggs, pickles and bread rolls. If unlucky, a set plate involving a few slices of cold meat and cheese, and a boiled egg.
8am: Out of the door, following the map from the previous edition to check out all the hotels, restaurants and attractions previously reviewed, and to add new ones to replace those that have closed or fallen from grace. It’s too early for most eateries to be open, but hotels generally have 24-hour reception. I’ll check almost everything in the book anonymously, but sometimes the production of an LP business card is necessary at a hotel. (“Just why do you want to see three rooms of different sizes?”)
1pm: After hours of trudging around town, and up and down the staircases of hotels (budget lodgings rarely have lifts), I’ll grab lunch, either at one of the restaurants in the book or at a possible contender. I also make notes from the menu. Unfortunately it’s not possible to eat at every eatery in the book (there aren’t enough mealtimes), but I can at least check out the decor, menus, clientele and other people’s meals by walking through a place.
5pm: If I’m lucky, I’ve covered enough places for the day. If not, and I’ve been delayed by dodgy directions, roadworks, bad weather, numerous closures from the previous edition, or an insufficient spread of restaurants or hotels, there might be a few more hours of trudging.
7pm: Dinner at another place either in the book, or aspiring to be. More notes.
8.30pm: Either a session of typing the day’s data into my laptop at the hotel, or research on the city’s nightlife. A lone bar visit is fine but, believe me, nothing is more tragic than sitting alone in a Polish nightclub at 9pm with a cheap drink, taking more notes.
11pm: Snatch a tiny bit of downtime, reading a book before bed. Having no English-language TV entertainment is a blessing as I get a lot of reading done (my literature this trip included Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, Anna Funder’s Stasiland, and Marina Lewycka’s rather entertaining novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian).
In writing this, I now realise that there actually is no typical LP day. Sometimes I’m up later, sometimes earlier, and sometimes a day is blown on travelling to a new city on a slow pospieszny (“fast”) train. On another day in Warsaw I might have a meeting at the Australian Embassy, to ask them about dangers and annoyances reported to them by travellers. Or I might grab some time to update my weekly travel blog with snippets from my current locale.
People often respond to hearing about my Lonely Planet gigs by saying: “That must be fun.” To which I say: “That’s the wrong adjective.” Stimulating, yes, fascinating, yes, memorable, yes, but not fun. Fun is what occurs when you travel less intensely.
But the pay-off lies in the moments when I’m able to take my focus off the job in hand, just for a moment, and feel the full impact of the glorious place I’m standing in.
On my first LP job, circumnavigating Poland in the bitterly cold winter of early 2006, I stood in the courtyard of Krakow’s Wawel Castle looking over a cityscape of snow-covered roofs and steeples; walked out onto a frozen lake in Masuria watched by an on-shore cat; hiked through a deserted, frozen forest to see huge European bison; and spent a memorable day in Hel (an attractive holiday town at the end of a long peninsula north of Gdansk, the last place in Poland to surrender to the Nazis in 1939).
There have also been some memorable encounters with Poles. Once an elderly man engaged me in conversation at a tram stop below the castle in Krakow. We could only converse in an awkward mix of Polish and German, but I slowly gathered that he was trying to tell me that he and his family had been taken to Germany as slave labourers in the war.
On another occasion I met a man on a train who had been held prisoner by the Soviets in Siberia for eight years in the 1940s. And last year I discovered that my Polish friend Magda had had her childhood fractured by the communist regime, when her opera singer mother fled to the West and was only occasionally allowed to visit her family in the years that followed.
So it’s not necessarily fun. But every so often on a Lonely Planet job, I walk around a corner and something unexpected and extraordinary happens – something that reminds me why I love to travel. And then all the hard work seems worthwhile.
Tim Richards is a freelance travel writer. You can find more of his work on his website, his travel blog, and follow his Twitter feed. He’s also the author of a continents-spanning novel Mind the Gap
Matt Golding is a Walkley-winning cartoonist; matt@threefingers.com.au
