The Colombia contributor who revealed this week that he didn't leave his desk must have been a little off-beam, writes fellow Lonely Planetauthor Fionn Davenportwhile Laurence Mackinweighs up guides' usefulness
MAUREEN WHEELER, one of the founders of the Lonely Planetguidebook publisher, once told me that to survive as a travel writer you have to be a little bit crazy. She said this while I was working on my first book for the company, the debut edition of its guide to Sicily. I didn't quite know what to make of the fact that my perceived weirdness got me the gig in the first place.
This week it emerged that Thomas Kohnstamm, one of the company's contributors, wrote part of Lonely Planet's guide to Colombia without having visited the country. By Wheeler's logic, he's got to be a little off-beam, too.
I've never met him, but reading his claim that Lonely Planetdidn't pay him enough to visit the country he was writing about got me thinking about my own travel-writing career. About how lonely it can be on the road. About how hard it is to juggle deadlines with good, accurate prose. About how hard it is to make money. About how Wheeler must have a point.
If I'd known all this in advance I don't think I would have got into it. I used to think that writing guidebooks would be easy. Armed with my love of adventure and a turn of phrase, I was going to produce pithy, punchy copy that ran with the likes of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux's. Complex cultures captured in two paragraphs, that kind of thing.
That first book put paid to all those notions and opened me up to the dirty truth about guidebook writing, beginning with the slow realisation that the fee wasn't the fortune I'd thought it was. For Sicily I was paid about £16,000 - which was more than I'd ever been offered to do anything. I had to pay all my expenses from this amount. This was the mid-1990s, so I figured I was going to earn about a third the price of a decent house. Take away six months of living expenses in Sicily, however, and I was left with the price of a small, very-second-hand car.
Nearly 15 years later the fees are no better, and I'm still renting. But I do have a decent second-hand car.
If there isn't a lot of money, there's even less time. Most guidebook writers work to ever-tightening deadlines, determined as much by publishing schedules - which are tighter because the web can provide instant info - as by the writer's determination not to blow the whole fee on hotels, rental cars and restaurant food.
Updates to existing guides need to be done quickly as much as thoroughly. An average-sized provincial city in a country guide might get up to eight pages of coverage. This includes up to 80 points of interest that need to be updated, checked for map location and replaced if necessary.
"Points of interest" is the guidebook term for (deep breath) hotels, restaurants, museums, galleries, cafes, pubs, beaches, hospitals, language schools, post offices, dentists, banks, rental offices and anything else that might be deemed important or relevant to the reader.
Don't forget, too, that a good travel writer must also pick the best - which means the most authentic, most fun, most popular, most current - of what that city has to offer because, hey, there's only eight pages to play with. On an average gig, it should take no more than two 16-hour days to wrap that city up before moving on to the next one. Easy, right?
Full-time travel writing is tough, stressful and often lonely. It's hard to form real friendships on the road, and bringing someone with me is like asking them to watch me work in the office - unless they want to help me update those points of interest before upping sticks and moving on. Quickly.
Which leaves me to travel mostly on my own, eating alone night after night and exploring the nightlife with a notebook and a map.
The reward for all this effort is not financial, but it does come, when the guide hits the shelves and I get to sit in a cafe watching a backpacker thumb through it. I sit in smug silence, knowing that my hard work has contributed immeasurably to this adventurer's experience. Until he turns to his partner and says: "This book is rubbish! I walked up the hill to the hostel and it has closed down. It's been closed for months!"
How did this happen? Easily. The text he's reading was written 18 months earlier, when the hostel was full of backpackers. I know this because I'm back in the same town, researching the next edition of the guide, which will be published at some point over the next year.
But my disappointed reader won't know of the next edition for a couple of years, and that's if I'm lucky and he hasn't decided to switch guidebooks or dump them in favour of fresh info gleaned off the web.
So why do I do it? A lot of reasons. Because I still love travelling. Because I learned how to do it with a relative degree of success. Because it's one of the few things I know how to do. Because Maureen Wheeler is spot on.
Fionn Davenport is a senior writer atLonely Planet and principal author of its Ireland guide
Guidebooks? Leave home without one
YOU ARRIVE in the dead of night at a deserted station in a country you can't find on a map, and you speak not a word of the language. But this is mere child's play for you, the seasoned tourist, for you have read your travel guide.
You whisk past the preying taxi drivers outside and head straight for the nearest bus stop, pronouncing "one ticket, please" in an accent as thick as a double ditch and as misguided as friendly fire. The travel guide has again saved your plump, touristy bacon again.
The best travel book depends on what kind of traveller you are. If history is your thing, Rough Guides or Lonely Planets are hard to beat. If it's visual highlights and colour you're after, DK's Eyewitness guides are good. If nightlife and culture set your pulse racing, then Time Outs could be the making of your weekend. And if the way to your heart is through your stomach, then a Zagat might be on the menu.
There are alternatives to the trusty, chunky book, in the form of travel websites. These have the same pros and cons that some news sites have compared with newspapers. Although updated regularly, they are largely unedited, and people are more likely to post negative than positive remarks.
As Shane Hegarty points out in his article on Lanzarote, that lone negative comment on the hotel you've booked for your week away will stick in your craw, rendering the other 10 positive comments meaningless in those anxious days before departure.
Some travel-guide entries make you question the motivations, and even sanity, of their authors. A recent guide to Warsaw listed five bars that no self-respecting Varsovian would be caught dead in. One was an Irish pub. If you want to go to Warsaw and drink with a bunch of foreigners (or a load of Irish), then this was the guide for you.
I recently booked a holiday to Gambia and was sent a copy of the Bradt guide to the country. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read and had me cackling away for hours - for mostly the wrong reasons. It may have been written in 2005, but it reads like something from the Victorian age. A brilliantly sympathetic section recounts how "middle-aged lonely women" looking for sex often get their hearts broken; we're told sternly that "if you have any sense you will stay away from drugs". Men in search of flings, paid for or otherwise, get short shrift and are told that "our heartfelt advice to anyone coming on holiday here just for sex is to go somewhere else and leave The Gambia alone. The vast majority of people don't want you here."
As for people who ask for your spare change, the authors say: "If no tourist ever gave out money to one of the beggars, then after a while the practice would stop and fade away. We know that many people feel guilty when asked for money by someone who is poorer than them, but are they that much poorer?"
These are, though, blips in an otherwise solid resource.
Guidebooks are brilliant tools before you leave home, but don't
cling to them when you arrive. The best guide is always a local, so
instead of consulting the index while the city swarms around you,
ask a person who might have a few minutes to spare. It might just
make your weekend and lead to an experience you couldn't read about
in any book.
Laurence Mackin
Which guide to go for
Lonely Planet. For backpackers on a budget.
Rough Guide. If you want more detail for your money.
Time Out. Hard to beat for restaurant and nightlife listings.
Bradt. For responsible tourists who want to give something
back.
Eyewitness. For a picture-perfect view of your destination.
Frommer's. They certainly don't sit on the fence with their
reviews.
Fodor's. Should help unleash your inner foodie.