Confessions of a travel guide writer

Seasoned travel book author Steve Fallon spills the beans on what it’s really like to pen guidebooks for a living.

“They pay you… to travel?” I write guidebooks for a living and the question comes with the baggage. Depending on my mood (and audience), I may reply: “Yeah, sure, sweet innit?” More likely, though, it’s something like: “Uh-huh, and I like sex too. But who wants to do it for a living?”

Guidebooks don’t write themselves. Even updates demand long weeks alone on the road, another lousy meal in an anonymous restaurant, a half-empty bed in a squalid hotel and a dead weight of brochures and maps in the backpack.

Then there’s the threat of disaster lurking around every corner, ready to pounce. Not minor inconveniences like getting kicked in the shins after being mistaken for a traffic warden in Katowice, or missing an infrequent ferry to some far-flung island off Brittany. No, I’m talking about disasters with a capital “D”, including hysterical ones to dine out on forever.

There’s a certain schadenfreude in hearing about someone’s mishaps, and comparing them is almost a competitive sport among guidebook writers. Funny disasters often involve animals – a friend of mine was attacked (so he says) by orang-utans in a Malaysian jungle and we’ve never heard the end of it. My story is a bit more pedestrian: I was tackled by a cock in central Dublin.

It happened in a flash. I was taking a shortcut through St Stephen’s Green, a lush square of lawn and trees. As the landmark Shelbourne hotel came into view, the cock stuck its head out from under a clump of bushes, rustled its brick-red plumage and scurried underfoot. Heels went over head, marked-up maps were scattered to the winds and I ended up on my backside, minus a day and a half of work. A young woman ran over to offer me a hand.

“Sure I’ve heard of him – he’s famous,” she said with a grin, referring to the seemingly legendary cockerel. “But I’ve never actually seen him.” And then, as if sharing a confidence, she whispered: “I like to think he keeps the toffs at the Shelbourne awake in the morning, don’t you?”

What I call “bad rash” disasters are the ones that appear to go away but then return, sometimes again and again. I moved to Budapest in the 1990s after half a lifetime in Asia. Organ concerts in 18th-century baroque churches, fresh raspberries by the kilo and a flat perched on picturesque Gellért Hill – I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. That was until I began to feel very sick, running delirium-inducing fevers of over 40ºC that would then plummet, throwing me into chilling spasms.

After one particularly severe bout, I found myself flipping through a guidebook to Asia and thinking about a difficult trip I’d made to a remote part of Indonesia the previous winter, marooned with no flights and almost no food. I read the health section and the penny dropped. Three hours after arriving at the Szent Laszlo Hospital in central Pest I had the positive results in hand: two types of malaria contracted in the swamps of south-western Irian Jaya eight months before.

Most guidebook writers have an all-time worst disaster under their belts, and the qualifying details can be very subjective. Mine, for example, involves neither murder nor mayhem but a misspelling. I’d researched and written the first English-language guidebook to newly independent Slovenia, and had just received an advance copy when my editor rang. “What did you think of the book?” she asked anxiously. I said I wasn’t sure about the cover. “No, Steve, not the cover. The mistake. How do you spell the President of Slovenia’s name?”

“Well,” said I, “K-u-r-c-a-n.” Silence. “No ‘r’,” she said. “There’s no ‘r’ in his name.” Uh-oh. We Bostonians tend to drop the ‘r’ where it should be and add it to where it shouldn’t. By putting an extra letter in Mr Kucan’s name, I’d dubbed the President of Slovenia a d**khead in our brand-new book about a brand-new country. They’re still talking about it in Ljubljana.

If you think getting off the road solves all the problems, think again. It’s true that as the end of a job draws near, anticipation borders on euphoria as I contemplate welcoming arms and ears, clean and familiar sheets and friends at the end of the line. But things aren’t always what they seem.

As for welcoming arms and ears, time was when you’d arrive home and you and your loved one would regale one another with tales of what had transpired during your travels/absence. In this age of mobiles, Skype, Facebook and Twitter, I usually know more about home when away than I did when I left.

As for those clean and familiar sheets, well, are things at home ever as they were? As the French say: “Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.” Everything wearies, everything breaks, everything goes away. And such is the nature of things like light bulbs and bathroom taps that do indeed lasse and casse, but do not passe.

Friends at the end of the line? When you ring your mates, they’ll ask you either “Where were you again?”, or “How was it?”. It’s actually the same question – the latter is just a bit more polite. A discourse on the splendours of Buda Castle at dusk or Poland’s Baltic coast at dawn is met by surprise (they’ve discovered where you’ve been), feigned interest (“Uh-huh” repeated several times) and silence (except for the clickety-clack of a keyboard).

Of course it’s not all bad! There are plenty of amazing, kind, happy and poignant experiences along the way that cling to you like burrs on a mountain trail and keep me doing the job. What about that cold drink offered outside a café on a warm August afternoon in Pau, for instance? What happens to those tales about the kindness of strangers, those train journey friendships and remembered vistas of purple mountains rising majestically above the fruited plain?

Best to keep those to myself, at least for now. Like dreams, they’re my own private property and, besides, they don’t make very good copy.