Killing Batteries

My hostel roommate the other night, an Aussie on a round-the-world tour, informed me that he’d run across ’several of your lot’, meaning guidebook writers, in the mere two months he’d been traveling so far. Indeed, if you’ve ever spent serious time on the road in spring or summer you too have probably encountered several guidebook writers and never known it. We’re everywhere, usually trying to keep a low profile. Up at dawn, back late, seemingly impervious to culture shock, encumbered with an inordinate amount of paperwork for a backpacker and very focused, which comes off as vaguely anti-social.

Ever mused in hushed tones about the eccentric loner, staying in the hostel’s only private room and smelling faintly of dirty laundry? Yeah, that was a guidebook writer. Here’s a comprehensive list of more telltale guidebook writer signs:

•    Exclusively wears shorts/pants with six pockets (which always seem to be bulging with accessories), non-descript shirt, shades, and butt-ugly, but very practical shoes.

•    Looks at every business marquee while speed-walking down the street at a scorching 5 MPH.

•    Is traveling alone and has a rental car.

•    Painstakingly saves all receipts.

•    Seems constantly distracted and lonely (by ‘distracted and lonely’ I mean horny)

•    Grills you and everyone else in the hostel for details about where you went and what you did that day and how you liked it. Then scribbles every detail down in a ludicrously large, bursting filofax or PDA.

•    May be intentionally vague when questioned about their career.

•    Seems to have memorized ridiculous amounts of information about the country you’re in.

•    Looks exhausted and disheveled, yet still intriguingly sexy.

Of course some of these details vary for females. I know at least one who uses her cleavage to get cooperation and/or entry to swanky restaurants and bars when doormen frown at her trainers. (I wish I had cleavage.) On the flip side, I’ll admit to batting my eyelashes and smiling sweetly at female hotel desk clerks and waitresses which frequently gets me the world. And it goes without saying, with my ageless, ’smoochy’ baby-face, gay men are putty in my hands.

Finally, I’m not going to sugarcoat it, if the guidebook writer seems eccentric, it’s probably because they’re genuinely eccentric. Exceedingly eccentric in some cases. I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms full of guidebook writers and it never ceases to make me (of all people) feel like a well-adjusted, charming, social wizard.

In truth, you kind of need to be a little peculiar to do this job. Occasionally one starts out sane and is duly driven batshit crazy by the singular, wide-ranging obligations expected of us. Either way, it’s an even bet that your guidebook writer, no matter how badly you might like to sit and pick their brain for hours, will ultimately make you wish you were in a public place, where you could excuse yourself from the table, walk casually into the bathroom, heave a chair through the window, jump down two stories into a dumpster and make your escape.

Tomorrow I fly back to Romania for the second time in three months like a jet-setting badass to complete my LP guidebook research, wallow in the fame of being a travel writing all-star, beat off amorous groupies with my medical burro riding crop and sleep soundly every night with the knowledge that my life kicks so much ass that my government actually imposes extra taxes on me for it.

If only.

I’m not going to deny that there are days that I struggle into my home-office desk chair at the crack of noon, with a mug of chocolate-flavored coffee, no boss in sight, having not donned shoes or a shirt in over 24 hours, read my two pieces of daily fan mail (and delete my 37 pieces of hate mail) and finally get to the grave task of writing caustic remarks and cheap shots about Berlin, Jesus and the slightly dry steak I ate while in First Class during my last flight over the Pacific, but equally, this job has its moments of sobering wretchedness.

Since I’m comfortably at the experience and wisdom levels now that allow me to accurately see into the future (by the way, it’s Splitsville for Christina Aguilera and Jordan Bratman in 2009), I’ll give you a preview of subjects you’re like to read about in this blog - or more likely, on my Twitter page - over the next three weeks while I’m on the road in Romania:

•    The hair-melting heat wave that’s descending on southern Romania as I write this

•    People that work in Romanian tourism, that plainly loathe tourists

•    Why in Buddha’s name did I choose to research in July, knowing that every decent hotel would be booked for weeks?

•    How many Ibuprofen per day I’m taking to fight back the hip pain

•    How little clothing women bother with on the Black Sea coast

•    The ethical dilemma of being treated like a vagrant by people whose businesses I could make or break with one sentence in the book

•    Loud hostels/little sleep

•    Has anyone sent me a check recently?

•    I have exactly zero confirmed work for after September 1st – do I worry about finances or celebrate the long-overdue break?

•    I’d kill for a cheeseburger

And so goes the head-spinning highs and demoralizing lows in the life of a travel writer.

All possible adversity, pain and humiliation aside, this is actually shaping up to be the easiest bit of guidebook research of my short career. I’ve got three weeks to do about two weeks worth of work, almost everywhere I’m going is unspeakably awesome (e.g. Sibiu, Braşov, Danube Delta, Black Sea Coast), and if things go well I’ll spend the final two or three days sitting on a beach and practicing my Romanian with some of Europe’s most beautiful women.

Now I have to go pack my guidebook writer cape and tights (the lavender or the burgundy, I can never decide), review my Romanian curse words and lewd gestures for that first drive through Bucharest, shave my head for optimum speed-walking aerodynamics and eat one last cheeseburger to offset the 5-8 pounds that I’m about to lose.

Over the past few years, I’ve become a household name in something like a dozen houses. With this kind of staggering fame comes ancillary perks and burdens. Some are great, like meeting readers on the road and enjoying their hospitality and local expertise. Others, not-so-great, like being spammed with tourism industry press releases sent by PR firms sweetly suggesting that I deviate from trash talking members of the media and mocking whole countries with hilariously bad internet service and instead write about their new business class seats to South America.

Further to the not-so-great parts of being rabidly popular, I’ve got some unimaginable news that’s going to shake the very cores of your respective worlds. Indeed, you may be overcome with faint upon hearing this information, so I strongly advise you to put down your coffee, assume a wide stance and position a friend/co-worker/medical burro so they can break your fall should the worst occur. Ready? OK…

Not everyone thinks I’m a literary genius.

[Pause for administering smelling salts]

The pitiable character flaws of my non-fans notwithstanding, some people take it even further and hate me. And some of those people take it even further than that and waste perfectly good time writing poorly worded missives about how much they hate me and then sending them to me and sitting back waiting for the sweet, sweet validation that will occur when I answer, admitting that yes, they are completely right, I am wrong and a terrible person and the quality of my upbringing and education is clearly to blame. Plus, I’m ugly.

There are really people like this.

It’s been a rocky road that I still drunkenly trip over once in a while, but I’ve managed to compile a simple, idiot-proof methodology for coping with hate mail that I will now share for the betterment of my travel writing colleagues should they ever attain the heights of fame that go with being ridiculed on the radio for two hours by The Hackensack Sister’s Breakfast Time Hack Show.

My fool-proof approach to hate mail has been proven time and again to be the quickest solution to dealing with angry readers and can be encapsulated in three simple words: laugh, delete, repeat.

No matter how much you want to be loved, never answer hate mail. I don’t care how openly wrong, narrow-minded, brain damaged and f*cked up they are, your reply will do no good. This is largely because anyone who has taken the time to send you hate mail has two, if not all three, of the following qualities:

1. Self-righteous
2. Pissed off
3. Batshit crazy

You could write the most diplomatic, rational, understanding and reality-fueled email in the history of the written word, but the fact is that one email isn’t going to cure their psychoses. It’s just not going to happen. Ever. So, don’t bother. If you try, not only will you be wasting your time, but nine times out of 10, you will only succeed in enraging your anti-fan even further, eliciting one or more follow-up hate mails to the tune of 2,000 words and maybe weeks of them spamming your blog’s comments section and sending you viruses in Word document attachments.

One time in a hundred you’ll get the sense that your hate mailer is actually reasonable and recognizes that people’s opinions differ and that they understand your views and that you’ll have to agree to disagree. Those people are batshit crazy too. Just because they’re high functioning batshit crazy doesn’t mean you should waste 20 minutes composing a reply, because it’ll probably get you nowhere and that person will never read your stuff again anyway, so screw ‘em.

Now on occasion you’ll get that juicy, jaw-dropping, frame-worthy piece of hate mail that’s just so irresistible that you can’t help but act on it. I’m talking about the one where the sender is so batshit crazy and attention starved that you feel compelled to f*ck with them a little. Again, this isn’t worth 20 minutes of your time, but with only a little one-time preparation, you can be ready to quickly strike back at these people in a way that’ll make them descend into jabbering, irreversible madness. I’m talking about instant primal de-evolution here, bounding around their basement apartments, slapping their chests, grunting and throwing their own feces at their mothers.

There’s no greater torture in life for a hate mailer than the knowledge that their precious hate mail will never be read. If you simply ignore them, they can still cling to the hope that you read and absorbed their ravings, but if you can indirectly convince them that you never saw it… instantaneous, frenzied, veritable tornado of feces - followed by a localized brainstem explosion.

Here’s what you do… Doctor up one of those infuriating MAILER-DAEMON email rejection notices that you get whenever you try to email anyone in Barcelona tourism. Carefully change the words to something along the lines of the following:

“Hi. This is the qmail-send program at [insert appropriate domain name].
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following address.
It could be that the recipient doesn’t accept mail from your domain. Please try again from a different email account. Thank you.”

Then paste a bunch of that email robot jibba-jabba below it and the hate mailer’s original message below that. Then go in and quickly change the user name that appears on your emails (this is easily done if you use an email client like Outlook) to ‘MAILER-DAEMON’ - don’t forget to change it back when you’re done. Then send the message.

You’ll get anywhere from two to 17 follow-ups from the hate mailer, resending the message over and over from different accounts. Sometimes they’ll go through the trouble of creating whole new accounts, with a bonus fuming preface at the top of the message detailing how much time and effort went into sending you their hate mail. Always reply with the failure message above. When the messages stop coming, you can rest in the probable knowledge that the hate mailer has been forcibly institutionalized by local authorities and will be composing future hate mail with their tongue while strapped in a straitjacket.

That concludes this lesson on dealing with hate mail. Tune in next time for tips on how to avoid being cajoled into doing practically free work with the promise of a “small time investment” on your part and eventual monster exposure only to find yourself sitting there two years later, 15 hours of you time pissed away on the editor’s anal retentive edits and rewrites, bringing your earnings to about US$1.63 an hour and the shit still hasn’t been published.

[Photo credit: Jonno Witts]

I just wanted to remind everyone that I own that book title for all eternity, even if the universe collapses in on itself and I never get a deal for my memoirs, so don’t even try to lift it. And yes, “Lamborghinis and Blowjobs” is too close.

I was thinking of this title last week as I sat down and finally started writing up the research notes from Romania and Moldova. The transition from road research to write-up is not an easy one. Self-starting in a solitary, familiar, static environment and staring at a non-lethal laptop for 10 hours a day can be challenging after a month of sensory overload, frenetic movement, red-lining physical and mental stimulation, incessant cultural challenges and adrenaline spikes while cheating death 47 times a day. I sat down to start writing when the hangover cleared on Wednesday afternoon. Actual writing didn’t begin until late Friday morning.

After the first 12 hours, the productive unease in the room was palpable, so I decided to have a quick motivational dialogue with my brain. I said “Brain, it’s time to start marking up maps, updating hostel prices and writing nice things about Bucharest that won’t make you hate yourself so we can pay the bills.” My brain countered by saying “I’m not doing squat until I’ve traveled at 130KPH on the third worst roads in Europe and come a whisker away from a head-on collision with an escaped cow. Now go get daddy some bon bons.”

So, I’m rethinking the title of my memoirs to reflect this perennial, seesaw internal struggle that all travel writers face. Something like “Lamborghinis and Valium – Why I Sometimes Have the Productivity of an Italian Bureaucrat”.

In the days since, I’ve satisfactorily re-discovered (because it’s constantly changing) the optimum combination of caffeine, semi-nude pictures of Michelle Hunziker and bon bons to make the Pulitzer-winning magic happen. My brain, conscious and body rarely agree on critical issues lately like when it’s time to sleep, when it’s time to wake up, which line at immigration will move the fastest and no, one more Strongbow wouldn’t hurt. At any given moment, the damage control I’m dealing with over here is akin to walking into a pre-school class two hours after the teacher accidentally locked herself in the bathroom. If I’m lucky, I get 2/3 of the room to cooperate, everyone else is eating worms and peeing in the fish bowl.

Finally, I’m not so narcissistic yet that a well-timed groupie email doesn’t totally make my day. No matter how much dope was smoked before the email was composed, it’s still flattering to be mentioned in the same breath with Tim Cahill. Scantly clad groupie-portraits are also warmly welcome, though people like Frank should use their best judgment.

Bucharest was pretty dreadful, but I’ve had worse. Naples comes to mind - and that hellhole Andorra la Vella. Or that time in Los Angeles, when I drove from UCLA to Orange County… Nevertheless, I won’t be buying property in Bucharest soon or even investing in a 10-ride metro card. In many ways Bucharest is like a port town, but without the port. People arrive by plane and train, then promptly flee for more agreeable destinations.

I’ll grudgingly admit that there are worthwhile things to see here, but having visited every notable patch of grass in Romania, I can say with complete authority that anything and everything in Bucharest exists in much better form and surroundings at several other places in the country. If you’ve only got four days, fine, stay in Bucharest, if not, you’re doing yourself a disservice by lingering here.

Though not nearly as demoralizing as driving in Bucharest - which has unbelievably gotten worse in the past three years - five days on foot in Bucharest could break the patience and love of Gandhi himself. Hell, just sitting on a street corner can drain the hardest man’s will to live. The incessant car horns, the dense pollution, people screaming at each other, half-dead dogs and filth… Vlad Tepeş wouldn’t last 10 seconds in modern Bucharest. The first time someone drove by with a cigarette in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, splashing him with a totally avoidable puddle, he’d completely lose his shit. If only skewering wrongdoers from asshole to neck was still legal, people would probably have better manners around here. (more…)

Actually, I don’t really have anything else to say to you guys. I board a flight in just over 24 hours and as soon as I touch the ground in Bucharest, I’ll be a blur of over-Red Bulled, under-rested, stress-addled, bilingual jabbering motion for the next four weeks. I could promise to submit trip reports here at least once a week, but I really have no idea if that’ll be possible. On the surface, this research trip appears to be a cakewalk, but this is a Romania and Lonely Planet perfect storm we’re talking about here. Two entities that on their own virtually guarantee unpredictable chaos. When put together, be terrified (on my behalf). Be very terrified (on my behalf).

For you guidebook groupies, this research trip is only to update the chapters on Romania and Moldova for Lonely Planet’s Eastern Europe and Europe on a Shoestring books. So while the total number of pages that I’m writing/updating is far less than if I were also researching for the Romania & Moldova book, the geographic area that I’m covering has nearly doubled (I didn’t cover Bucharest or Transylvania last time, that was Robert’s job). So, while there’ll be less facts to check in each city and therefore less time spent pounding the pavement, there’ll be more time driving and as I’ve already testified, despite improvements in road conditions and driving behavior, driving in Romania and Moldova largely remains white knuckle, ass-tightening anarchy.

(more…)

For f*cks sake. What is it lately with idiots in travel media happily volunteering details about their enthusiastic drug use?

First the most short-sighted travel writer in the history of the world - since the guy that moblogged the Crusades - regaled us with how he used/traded/sold drugs during his incredibly, remarkably voluminous down time while doing guidebook road research in Brazil. Now Richard Quest, host of “CNN Business Traveler,” a show I’ve deeply enjoyed, helpfully divulged to police this weekend that he was packing a baggie of meth when he was picked up for loitering in Central Park after closing. Why God, why????

One has to assume that Richard was in an altered state at the time, but for the record, I’d like to introduce him - and any other visiting media from the U.K. – to this wacky concept that we in the U.S. call an “evidence drop.”

Essentially, when you’re holding gear and doom is imminent, you simply hide/chuck/flush or otherwise dispose of your stash before the fuzz tackles you. Admittedly, this is easier said than done in some circumstances, say while you’re tweaking in a car traveling at 110MPH in broad daylight while being pursued by six police cruisers and a helicopter. Inevitably someone will notice the incriminating package being tossed out the window and spinning off into the ditch. If not that, then most definitely the pair of Glocks that follow it. But, people honestly, when you’re in a darkened park, late at night, between the moment when the cruiser spotlight hits you and the moment that you’re in handcuffs, there’s plentiful opportunity to fling drugs, weapons, your prize-winning cock fighters or just about anything into the bushes. Indeed, if you plan to make a habit of cruising major metropolitan areas with felonious material, this is exactly the type of maneuver that it’d behoove you practice once in a while.

Oddly, masochistically, even after all the bad press of the past week, I’m still inexplicably desirous of a book deal and/or TV show hosting gig. But now I see I’ve been going about it all wrong. I’ve been trying to portray myself as a stable, hilarious and devilishly attractive candidate, which I see now is for losers and failures. So to demonstrate to everyone that I have limitless untapped range, please refer to the following photos, previously kept quiet, that I’m releasing now as it’s plainly clear that material like this is key to my instant and wild success.

Incidentally, I never went to Romania. And I researched Tuscany from the kitchen table of a brothel on the outskirts of Livorno. And I was on opium the whole time that I got for free in exchange for a positive review.

Please send all offers of cash and fame to my agent. Thank you.

I bet you all clicked over here expecting biblical raving about what everyone else is raving about right now in the form of a “This is what’s pissing me off today” to end all “This is what’s pissing me off todays”. Well, you’re not getting it.

There’s just no point. I haven’t read the book, details leaked by lazy media hacks about the book are turning out to be wrong, the book’s scandalous anecdotes, it seems, are greatly embellished… I’m not gonna waste my time filleting rumors that are so thinly connected to reality. I’ll just do what every other LP author is planning to do: wait until the release date, walk over to my neighborhood Barnes and Noble, pick up a copy of the book, swing through the on-site Starbucks for a ginormous iced coffee, sit down in a comfy chair, read the good portions of the book, put it back on the shelf 20 minutes later, come home and go to bed confident in the knowledge that my memoirs, staged in over a dozen countries, illustrating how success at travel writing can be had with honest, hard work rather than passive-aggressive deception and lies, while being hilarious without resorting to cheap shots or sabotaging my colleagues’ repute, would have been about 1,000% better. Or thereabouts.

Honestly, it seems to be nothing more than a so-so account of a couple short trips, with liberal Hunter S. Thompson style-theft, exposing the supposed dark underbelly of guidebook writing, while detailing with baffling honesty why he’s the worst travel writer to ever do the job. Where’s the controversy?

Meanwhile, I have larger matters to puzzle over, specifically my new LP business cards. It’s not that I don’t like them. Indeed, they’re infinitely cooler that the old ones. One side has the usual contact info and the other side has our pictures!!!

Now, Lord knows I like to see pictures of myself, but large portions of a guidebook writer’s job requires them to surreptitiously enter, assess and review hotels, restaurants, etc, and it seems if we’re running around handing out business cards with our pictures on them, it might make it a little easier for proprietors to spot us coming down the road and quick repaint the walls and herd the family dogs out of the kitchen into the back alley. We might as well have an advance team, entourage and police escort since any semblance of anonymity will be completely erased as these cards proliferate around our research regions.

Don’t get me wrong, under the right conditions, I’ll take all the attention and notoriety I can get. Never mind the business cards, if the right tourism official/publisher/beautiful woman appears, I yank a rip-cord on my belt and a neon green, glow-in-the-dark, full-body sandwich board inflates in exactly 1.4 seconds that reads “Yes, I’m a travel writer!” Best $29.99 I ever spent.

That said, I’ve been proudly handing these babies out to every person even remotely tied to tourism in the past few weeks to resounding ‘ooos’ and ‘ahhs’. These cards are like little, instant celebrity bombs. Every time I hand a card to someone new, their mouths go slack, their eyes dilate and I can feel the recipient start undressing me with their eyes. That’s assuming I’m wearing clothes in the first place, which I often wasn’t on Guam and Saipan. Jesus, it was hot there.

While I struggle with the ethical dilemma of whether to use my new business card superpowers for good or evil, I’ve gotta do some actual work over here. It took almost a week, but I’m finally moved in and set up in my bitchin’ new condo. I’m sitting at an honest-to-Buddha desk for the first time in almost five years and I can feel a tidal wave of productivity gathering strength that I’ll harness to finally knock out this article about Guam/Saipan.

But first, maybe I’ll make an omelet.

Greetings from the hot, sunny, duty free paradise that is Guam!

My five day “familiarization tour” is coming to a close. It’s been a lot better than I’d expected in virtually every way. Furthermore, I think I may have stumbled upon an earth-shaking revelation: I haven’t actually crunched the numbers yet, but I have a solid theory that a week in Guam is actually cheaper than a week in Hawaii, never mind the dry heave difference in plane ticket prices. At the end of the week, after you factor in accommodations, food, on-island transportation, activities and, of course, shopping, I think when you reach the bottom line the added expense of the plane ticket is equalized and Guam has the advantage. There’s still the little matter of it taking nearly two days to get here and back - two days that you’re not sitting on a beach with a primary-color cocktail in one hand and your sun reflector in the other - but that’s something to debate in another forum.

I’ve been treated very well on Guam. The natural friendliness and common courtesy of the residents has been vastly magnified by the treatment I’ve received at my “home,” the Sheraton Laguna Hotel.

The Guam Visitor’s Bureau is keen to boost tourist numbers from the continental US and my little but powerful magazine is a bull’s-eye in terms of hitting their prime demographic: moneyed, intrepid, frequent business travelers. The Sheraton concurred, agreeing to host me for an unheard of six straight nights. The Sheraton, just opened in April of 2007, looks new, smells of mahogany and natural oils and is operated by a staff with NASCAR pit crew teamwork and precision.

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For those of you that weren’t waiting in line at midnight, Lonely Planet’s latest edition of Tuscany & Umbria hit the shelves recently and through the magic of sub-standard mail delivery I just got my hands on my free author copies a few days ago.

That’s right, author copies. Why? Because I helped write that bitch, that’s why. Pages 213 through 308 to be exact.

As I’ve confessed here repeatedly, my being thrust into the brass ring of guidebook writing jobs was the direct result of an untimely bacterial lung infection (not mine) and using up about a decade of banked karma by conveniently being in Italy and doing nothing particularly important at the time. Seeing as how I was a sub and the regular (infected) author’s text was in such great shape, I hesitated to alter too much, but vast quantities of coffee during that panicky write-up interval and my uncontainable goofball humor repeatedly got the best of me.

Some of my more notable zings that somehow made it through editing include:

• Used the phrase “stupid Florence” (p237, 2nd column, last paragraph)
• Compared the rough port city of Livorno to a grade school girl bully (p213)
• Used the phrase “screw-the-Pope” (p295, 2nd column, 2nd paragraph)
• Slipped in a sarcasm-rich box text about Saint Catherine of Siena, entitled “Mom! Catherine’s Consecrating Her Virginity to Jesus Again!!” (p245) that eventually inspired the post “Good for nothing kid or future saint?”

Also, I must say that I hit the Eating sections hard. I heroically managed to dine in nearly 70 Tuscan restaurants during my 31 days on the road for this guidebook. There were times that I reeked so much of truffle oil that dogs came running out of the hills and gave chase as I drove by. I spent over 150 euros on gelato alone. I drank enough wine to earn a lifetime membership in the Pope Paul III Wine Appreciation Club.

I’ve had precious little free time to do more than skim my chapters and admire the “smoochy” picture of me in the front “On The Road” color section, but I know for a fact that my co-authors are all geniuses, so their sections are probably at least as good, if not better than mine – minus copious snarky comments about popes and Florence.

There’s already been a flood of positive reviews about the book online. Here are a few quotes:

“This guidebook changed my life. I’ve arranged to be legally wed to it.” – Leif Pettersen, Amazon.com

“I don’t know what’s better, this guidebook or porn.” – User “love_of_your_leif”, Travelers That Love Porn Dot Com

“This guidebook is what you would get if you took DNA from Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Michelle Hunziker, put it all in an incubator with 452 blank pages for nine months, then fed it with Diablo Cody’s breast milk.” – Genetics Society of America Book Review

In closing, having taken all factors under careful, impartial consideration, I declare that this is the greatest guidebook in the history of the universe. Twelve out of five stars, plus the KB Seal of Pure Genius Awesomeness™. Get it now before the first printing sells out and you can only get copies on eBay for $2,000, sold by some company calling itself Leiftime Book Brokers.