Bed rotting in paradise
and a few travel writing realities
I'm writing a first draft of this newsletter nd notes of where it might go from somewhere over Western Australia. It’s flight fifteen of the year and I’m heading to Broome (Rubibi), some 2,500km north of my home in Margaret River. London to Istanbul would be a comparison in distance yet I haven’t left the state.
It’s perhaps just geography and old white men drawing lines on maps for some but the fact that I can leave the wintery south west with bruised sky, downpours and storms that brought down trees, to then bring out the summer shirts and shorts, and feel the warmth deep in my bones on the pindan red Kimberley coast, is still something of a wonder to me. That is the magnitude of Australia and in particular its sometimes overlooked west coast.
I’m travelling for work as I most often do. The concept of leisure travel has been foreign to me for years. There’s always a story, always a thought of one. The airport in Perth is so often a sea of hi-vis as workers fly in and out to the mines dressed in their corporate workwear. They look at me and perhaps see a guy who is heading away on holiday. When I explain to people what I do they’ll often say “oh, well enjoy your little break.” It irks me, as do the words “jolly” and “jaunt” in this context. As with gripes about reviewing restaurants, whingeing about travel journalism (to those outside the circle) is most often met with a narrowing of the eyes and a pursing of the lips, maybe accompanied with a straightforward “you can fuck right off.”
The reality of travel journalism is perhaps not what you imagine. I’ll caveat this first with what I find myself saying a lot - my general disclaimer - in that I realise that I’m hugely privileged in what I do, am regularly provided with opportunities that money can’t buy and others that money can buy but are way beyond my wallet. I do it all out of choice, so no great hardship. But, here’s a few of the realities.
It’s not a holiday, at least not for me. I don’t switch off as you might on holiday and I’ve not yet mastered the art of just ambling around, looking at things and producing copy that sings, which is on one hand about timelines and on the other, the fact that when things seem effortless they rarely are.
Speak to travel journalists (I class myself more as a food journalist who travels) and they’ll often lament that they would like more time in a destination. Usually you’re in a race to distill a place, a culture, it’s people and food into seemingly fewer and fewer words as budgets get tighter and tighter. This can mean that you race to and from different itinerary points, thinking, oh I’d love to come back here one day. You rarely do. It also means stacking stories, which is the art of getting as many commissions as you can from a trip.
Sometimes you get lucky and have a little padding time-wise or you have the clout to make that so, but it seems rare. Modern travel journalism generally works on the basis that a publisher pays for your words but a tourist board or similar interest pays for your travel. Time is money. It sometimes draws the criticism of being a conflict of interest and that’s for the individual journalist and publisher to manage. My stance is that I’m not going to write fiction for the sake of a funded trip so if someone is trying to exert undue influence I’m out.
That said, I’ve fully or partly funded trips when there’s a story I want to tell (this doesn’t usually make much sense financially) or it fits in with a personal agenda. Most recently travelling to the eastern states of Australia, the UK and Copenhagen. On my own dime those trips bore some great commissions but the majority of the experience will be shared here in the coming months. Those trips also serve as inspiration that could strike several months or several years after travel. It’s about having creative gas in the tank I suppose.
There’s the reality of renumeration, as rates and feature lengths tend to be on the slide. Publishers often want photography and sometimes video for social and they don’t always pay much or at all for it. Travel writing can be a very picturesque slog. A friend who writes mainly travel recently made the point that it’s like living two lives. There’s the seasoned traveller of the Instagram grid, seemingly living their best life in great hotels and restaurants, and then there’s the sleep deprived writer bookending very long days with hours of polishing notes, backing up interview files and photos, replying to edits from trips long past, and doing all the daily life admin that you’d do in your home office. It’s not manual labour but I think you’d agree it’s not a holiday. Put another way, I often feel like I spend much of my time pretending to be on holiday.
I’ve been mindful of all of this for some time and recently vowed that I’d make good choices on the trips that I take and try and carve out time for myself, to fuflfil my own agenda beyond the gustatory. That could be finding a church. I’m pretty much agnostic but sitting quietly on a pew or lighting a candle in a new place for those in my life who did believe is one of the things that can fill my cup to brimming. Add to this file, sitting on benches (it’s all go travelling with me), ideally ones with memorial plaques where for a moment I can think about soneone I never knew but know they’d be happy with this bench and its outlook. Catching a gig solo as I did in Copenhagen is another, or finding a cinema with a morning showing.
Straying towards the territory of but you said it’s not a holiday, is some degree of bed rotting. I did this on my final days in London recently and on this Broome trip. I could have taken to Cable Beach or the large communal pools in the two places that I stayed but as I’d set my own itinerary I took advantage of huge TVs, a corner view out to Roebuck Bay which was nothing but blue sky, comfy beds and crisp, fresh linen. Is this what a holiday feels like?