03 March 2010
What is 'Real Travel' Revisited
> In the context of this discussion, i.e. about famils/press trips, I consider 'real' travel to be travel that is going to as close to the experience of the average independent traveler who organizes everything themselves and has to face the hiccups that come with that, from bookings that haven't been held to missed connections for example.
This improved definition doesn't completely address the points made in the earlier post on which it comments.
In order to provide quality research for the independent traveller one has to behave actually quite differently from an independent traveller: staying in several different hotels rather than one; visiting many other hotels; visiting and assessing every sight; spending time asking many questions so that no independent traveller will have to ask them; eating at many different kinds of restaurants and trying many different kinds of transport. This, at least, is the minimum for any serious guidebook work, and it doesn't resemble holiday travel, or 'real' travel under this definition, in any way.
Travel features these days rarely come with as much comprehensive practical information as they should, although editors quite reasonably presume they need to offer a good read rather than fill their pages with technicalities that can also be garnered from web sites and guide books. Nor is it clear that taking a journey once, and finding that a connection is missed (in the example given) is of itself going to tell us very much about the normal experience. Perhaps on the other 364 days of the year the connection is made. Perhaps, in order to give useful advice, it's going to be necessary to enquire further as to whether the connection is usually made. Once that is admitted the case for having to do it exactly the way an independent traveller would do is rather weakened, at least for feature writing. If the trip is part of the story of course it has to be taken, but often the destination is the story, not the method of getting there, and picking up a rental car organised by someone else, or even being driven, will make no significant difference to the quality of the experience to be described, and may indeed provide opportunities for richer writing.
There's no particular merit in spending three days trying to find someone willing to be interviewed for background (and in many cultures simply being unable to do so because you do not have the requisite introduction) when there's an agency that can make the arrangements for you. At their best, these agencies fill out the agenda you set, and there seems no good reason, when you've asked for access to be provided to a certain castle for instance, to turn down the opportunity to interview the eighth-generation owner who now resides in a small part of it, and who can tell you stories about repairs, about quirky ancestors, about her plans for the future, and other information of interest to readers, even though they will never themselves encounter the individual in question (and so, by the definition offered, the visit isn't 'real').
But travel writing isn't after all a scientific experiment, nor typically objective, and while the results need to be similar when the travel-experiment is repeated, they do not need, and indeed can never be, exactly the same. Travel writing is frequently full of fortuitous one-off events that make it more interesting to read, and none the worse for the fact that no one else can repeat those events.
The argument also seems to want to ask me to put down the tools I have at my disposal and which I would usually use to help me winkle out the facts needed by the independent traveller. These would include far more experience of independent travel than the average traveller has, often repeated experience of a particular destination and knowledge of its particular quirks, and, to take China as one example, a knowledge of the local language which 99% of other independent 'real' travellers won't have. Yet this enables me to read bus station signboards, to make detailed enquiries of departure times, ticket regulations, directions to platforms, and a great deal of background information. which the 'real' traveller would be unable to get for himself. The point of the research is provide precisely the tools the independent traveller needs, and there's no merit in simply going up to the ticket window as any other traveller would, using my native language and sign language only, and struggling to achieve my aims, when I could instead find out precisely what the 'real' traveller needs to know in a few moments using the local language in a way the 'real' traveller almost certainly cannot. Then I can give him the characters for what he needs, so he can show them at the ticket window and have a good chance of getting what he wants fairly quickly.
To argue otherwise amounts to supporting the position sometimes taken in defence of the Lonely Planet method of sending people off to write guide books about countries they haven't previously experienced: "That's good, because they travel just like us." But I don't want a book that through pure ignorance leads me into pitfalls that the authors have been unable to detect, with information that is false, as is the case in many a shoddy LP guide. I want a book written by someone with long experience of the destination, familiar with the local culture, and with command of a local language, who will actually be able to find out what it going on.
Ignorance is never bliss, and avoiding the high prices that may be paid as a result of inexperience is precisely the reason people buy guide books.
> I see the experience of being chauffered everywhere by a driver with a PR person at the elbow as being sanitized, artificial and therefore 'unreal' because this isn't how the vast majority of people I'm writing for travel. It would be different of course if I was writing for people who primarily take organized tours, as the experiences are very similar.
The first point has been dealt with previously and above, and while there's every reason to be cautious of PR people, the agenda of many is no more than to enable writers to get the stories they want, which gives a richer and more informative account to those who will travel independently afterwards, not a less informative one.
I engineer and tweak itinerary contents to suit my own agenda, and turn down trips where it's clear that's not going to be possible. The lady who drove me from place to place around Jamaica was perfectly frank about the country's problems, while providing a lot of background into Jamaican culture simply through conversation about both our lives and about what we saw as we drove around. I didn't want her to start with, because this can sometimes turn out really badly, but if I return to Jamaica (as I hope to do) I'd be very happy to travel with her again. She enabled me to get a lot of good material, as the best guides with the best tourism bureaux, often do.
I'm not long back from possibly my 40th trip to Hong Kong and another excellent experience with a guide who took me round tiny back street areas for a story on lesser-known Hong Kong districts, constantly revising the itinerary as she grew to better understand my needs.
There's no dichotomy here: not all PR efforts are evil or deceptive, and very little travel undertaken to assemble travel stories directly resembles the experience of individual leisure travellers. Usually it cannot; and it certainly need not do.
The second point concerning organised tours is, I think, incorrect. Groups press trips, as already pointed out, bear no resemblance to organised tours as usually experienced as, once again, they are designed to make it possible for a group of journalists to get material usable for stories. They also take routes to combinations of destinations no organised tour would ever take, and often offer special access that make the stories richer. I usually avoid these, not least because there's often one idiot journalist (or 'journalist') who makes things difficult, everyone ends up taking home the same stories, and these stories are often rather obvious and predictable. But occasionally they are designed flexibly enough that individual writers can get different angles from each other, and provide access otherwise hard to get if travelling individually.
But I can't in general think of a good argument for turning down the offer of making arrangements for access to sumo training stables if those are the focus of a story; nor the provision of an interpreter who quickly scribbles down for me translations of what the stable master or trainer is saying to the trainees; nor the opportunity provided to talk directly to the trainees and staff (nor the provision of a taxi to get there). It's hopeless to think that in two weeks in Japan I'm going to be able to say very much that's meaningful (despite multiple visits I speak only a few phrases of Japanese) about a culture that's so complex and different, and I'd look pretty foolish if I tried. Concentrating on the detail of the stables' history and traditions, the experience of watching the training sessions at two of them, I'd still be foolish to turn down the assistance provided. (Thanks, Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau for making the arrangements, and apologies that appearance of the piece has been delayed.)
Finally, it needn't be (and in fact isn't) the purpose of all travel writing to provide instructions to others as to how they can follow the same route. Some travel writing intends merely to inspire readers to do their own research and make their own arrangements, and other travel writing, as was originally the case of most of it before the whole population of the developed world took to the skies, intends merely to describe, in an entertaining and vivid way, experiences that readers will probably not be having for themselves. In these cases whether the castle is reached by public transport, by self-drive in a rental car paid for by someone else, or by chauffeured limousine is neither here nor there, as long as the castle is reached.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Nice to catch up on what you've been doing, Peter. Some great writing here. I'd love to respond to a few of your posts - especially this one obviously - but it will have to wait for another time. Flat out on a new project this year, which you may be interested in (http://grantourismotravels.com/), so shall visit again on a day when I have I have more time. Are you on Twitter, Peter?
Post a Comment