MyWestworld

Behind the Beautiful Sunsets

Posted on 02. Aug, 2008 by Kerry Banks in Travel Blog

Two books on travel writing that were published within the last year have provoked a storm of controversy. Both books—Do Travel Writers Go To Hell, by Thomas Kohnstamm and Smile When You’re Lying, by Chuck Thompson—are awash in sex, drugs, booze and assorted illegal activity, but that’s not the main reason they caused a stir. They attracted attention because they both took critical shots at the travel writing profession and the guide book industry. Dirty little secrets were aired.

Kohnstamm’s book is a memoir about how he bailed from Manhattan corporate dronedom (stuck in a soul-crushing job helping lawyers find loopholes for white-collar criminals) and a crumbling relationship with his girlfriend, to take an offer to update northeastern Brazil for an upcoming edition of the Lonely Planet guide book series. Kohnstamm’s assignment required that he cover 1,000 miles of coastline, write 100 pages of copy including 150 hotel reviews, plus more than 150 bar and restaurant reviews and update a dozen maps–all within a span of a mere four weeks. As well, he was instructed not to accept freebies while during his research. Kohnstamm describes how his early idealism soon hit the wall of a cold, hard disillusionment: that the time and money the publisher provided for him to collect an enormous amount of information about a vast territory was completely inadequate.

As a result he cuts corners, writing about locales that he doesn’t visit, swapping freebies for favourable copy, selling Ecstasy to finance part of his trip and employing euphemistic phrases in his reviews, as in the following example. “The waitress suggests that I come back after she closes down the restaurant, around midnight. We end up having sex in a chair and then on one of the tables in the back corner. I pen a note in my Moleskine that I will later recount in the guidebook review, saying that the restaurant “is a pleasant surprise . . . and the table service is friendly.” Along the way, the author indulges in a lot of excessive drinking, shacks up with a Brazilian prostitute, befriends an Israeli mercenary, and has a .38 revolver stuck in his mouth. More about the writer and his personal dilemmas than Brazil, the book reads like a work of fiction, which, considering Kohnstamm’s reputation, much of it may be.

Kohnstamm generated considerable buzz for his book by admitting in an interview prior to the book’s publication that he invented copy on all three of the Lonely Planet South American guides that he worked on and never actually went to Columbia. “They didn’t pay me enough to go to Colombia,” he said. “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating–an intern at the Colombian consulate.”

Lonely Planet obviously wasn’t happy with Kohnstamm’s admissions, nor were those readers who had previously regarded the series as some sort of backpacker’s bible. Still, with six million guide books sold annually, the company can afford a few kicks in the keister.

Chuck Thompson isn’t a fan of Lonely Planet either, citing the company’s books’ ceaselessly strident PC tone and snooty sermonizing. But then Thompson rips into a whole slew of subjects in his hilarious and vitriolic memoir: Smile When You’re Lying. Thompson calls New Zealand “a junior-varsity version of the Pacific Northwest,” disses the entire Caribbean as “a miasmic hellscape” with “an artificial culture,” and gleefully puts the boots to TV travel host Rick Steves. “Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial,” he writes of one of Steves’s Eastern European video tours. “Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a ‘goulash’ of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of ancient and modern.”

Thompson proclaims himself “suspicious of almost all travel writing” and dismisses most of it as boring, overheated, clichéd pablum dictated by the need to please advertisers. He seeks to take a different approach in this book. “I wanted to write about travel the way I experienced it,” he states in his introduction, “not the way the travel business wants readers, wants you, to imagine it is. The presumption that readers have the intellectual curiosity of a squirrel monkey and the moral range of an Amish yam farmer has worn thin.” In between firing off acidic broadsides, Thompson, a veteran freelance travel journalist and the founding editor of Travelocity’s short-lived magazine of the same name, recounts his seedy and sometimes harrowing misadventures, including getting robbed in Thailand, running afoul of customs inspectors in Belarus, experiencing the penis Olympics in Japan, and standing on a deserted stretch of highway in the Philippines at 3 a.m., desperately waiting for an arriving bus, as eight machete-wielding men emerge from the brush and approach for a friendly chat.

Although it isn’t really the no-holds barred exposé of the travel writing industry that is advertised on the inexplicably bland book jacket, Smile When You’re Lying is a crackling good read that will have you choking with laughter.  And for those who appreciate practical advice when they read about travel, Thompson even serves up some helpful tips, such as how to resurrect dead batteries. “If your batteries die while you’re in the air, rub them briskly for a minute or two on your pants leg. The static electricity will give them a recharge that’ll last as long as an hour or two. This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote.”