Travel Tips

I get a few e-mails asking how I write about places. I don't think my writing is especially good, but I do enjoy writing about places. After some thought, and still with some reluctance, I'll share some of my suggestions for writing about places.

Travel writing is very difficult, because when I visit places I have to be thinking about what I am going to write. A snapshot with "Here's a church" (somewhere in the distance behind four ice-cream sellers and a abbatoir) is not going to be good enough. Writing is about bring alive the spirit of the place. Some writers tend to do this by concentrating on the people (Hemingway, Jan Morris), others on the historical characters (Frances Wood, Juliet Bredon), while others focus on the place (most current guidebooks). Very few manage to balance all three (michael Palin manages to do it). I will never be in the same league as any of them, but I know I tend to focus on the place as well - it is the easiest and quickest, but also probably the least rewarding. On VT, 99% of writing looks at the place.

Good tips and reviews cover all the diferent aspects, including what may not particularly interest you as an individual. The travel writer often has to cover the mundane (left luggage facilities at the station, where are the check-in desks at the airport, useful information at hotels, emergency numbers, where's the visa office). Of course you don't need to cover any of that, but if you want to be comprehensive you should.

Sources of information. I normally buy every guidebook to every place I visit. Repeat after me - "every guidebook". Big, small, thin, fat, good, crap.
Before I go I usually take photocopies of relevant pages. On a recent day out in Cape Town, I was armed with nine guidebooks, four museum-specific guidebooks, two books on trees, one on birds, one history book and pages from 23 other books in my rucksack. Also I had three cameras with me, a pair of binoculars and about 4 maps of the city. Nerd? Yep! Big time!
I tramp the streets, photograph everything that doesn't move and drink a lot of coffee while I write up notes. On a two month trip through South Africa, I filled two notebooks. Record everything.
When you have read masses about a place before, it provides enough information to get the best of the place. It also stuns tour guides into silence. I am, truly, a tour-guide's worst nightmare: I am, surely, the first tourist to have asked a question about the manufacturer of the clock above the gate at the entrance to the Castle of Good Hope.

As you can see from my pages, I write about the history and try to get information that is not in the guidebooks. The standard stuff I write is from a variety of guidebooks, internet sources, interpretative panels (photograph every one) and from asking to see the manager or curator at every place I go. In China I have an additional advantage in that I am a tourism consultant and can usually get access to people through work. Nothing is plagiarised, ever: I soak in the story from all the different sources and then sit down (with my coffee....milk, two sugars, thank you) and write whatever comes out.
I write a lot about some places, but at others there is simply less to write. In China and Laos, there is little written in English (or French or German) about places, people, local culture once you get away from the main areas. I rely on historical sources and interviewing local people, which is time-consuming given my very poor Chinese. Friends often translate stuff for me from Chinese or local ethnic languages.

The secret ingredient is with you: it all depends on what you see when you travel. If you see it, you can record it.