Roving Gastronome: The Blog

Just a little more light shed on the whole Kohnstamm business: a good essay on World Hum by the always smart Robert Reid, who I also happen to know in passing through LP and other friends.

He has the empathy for Kohnstamm that most don’t (or aren’t willing to have), and he summarizes the small joys of doing the job that few people are mentioning at the moment (skip to the end).

The comments section is a bit odd: people seem unduly obsessed with his finances. It all boils down to getting hitched, folks–for that alone, I recommend it.

I like writing travel guides. I like it a lot, even when I complain.

But I think I like making the maps more. Maybe I wouldn’t like cartography as a full-time job, but as a break from all the damn writing and phone-number-checking, pulling out my ruler, white-out and colored pens and getting down to business on a map is really, really satisfying.

And when I was just in Taos, I found a product that makes me want to do my maps even more: mechanical colored pencils (see product #128-26)! Dude. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. The colors are really sharp and rich too. Years ago, I experimented with colored pencils, but the color was too faint and didn’t read clearly, and I could never get a sharp-enough point. Now I have a random assortment of highlighters and colored gel-ink pens, but the drawback with those is that it’s easy to smear the lines if you’re moving too fast. Also, those gel-ink pens are all sort of glittery, so my maps wind up looking like The World According to Hello Kitty.

But colored mechanical pencils! They never need sharpening, first of all. There are five colors, plus black, in the box. That’s enough for hotels, restaurants, text changes, graphics changes and some wild cards TBD.

OK–must quit mooning over my pencils and get to the writing. We do what we have to do so we can do what we want to do.

Just added to the links list: Notes from the Slippery Slope, which we cognoscenti know better as The Friday Afternoon Update. Naomi has been making me laugh every week via my email inbox for, eesh, years now. She made the move to a blog format a little while ago, but because I still get the weekly FAU email I’ve only just remembered about the newfangled approach–now, for everyone’s enjoyment! The recent post about First Man Bill Clinton was a goodie.

As it happens, ABQ wasn’t so big-city after all. I was strolling around downtown (aka The District, according to the slick magazine/brochure the city puts out to promote its new urbanist efforts), and happened to spy an ancient-looking shoe store: a faded sign jutted out from the shopfront: “HALE” vertically, block letters, “shoes” horizontally in script. (Or that’s the way I remember it–the place is already shifting into long-lost legend in my head.)

Let me just explain here: Yes, I was doing book research. But yes, I was also shopping. I never, ever shop in NYC because it’s a pain in the ass–crowds, surly clerks, screaming babies. When I’m traveling, I buy everything from postage stamps to deodorant to jeans–the amount I throw down on the road can look shocking to my traveling companions, but trust me, I’m not spending like that at home, because it would make me way too crabby. And compared with buying a bike the day before, pausing at a shoe shop–something a tourist in ABQ might even conceivably do–seemed pretty on track, work-wise.

When I stepped into the shadowy area by the inset display windows, I saw total time-warp inventory: all those puffy-all-over old-lady shoes with sensible heels, Hush Puppies from before they got a brand makeover, dowdy cold-weather boots. Nothing I could rock even with a huge dose of retro irony. But way over in the corner, I saw a pair of these German sandals that just last month I’d run across online–Worishofers. They looked comfy, not too frumpy and, best of all, sensibly designed to stay on your feet in even the slip-on variety.

I pushed open the door, and could barely see a thing. The tiny shop was very dim, and stacked floor to ceiling with shoe boxes. By the time I’d located my shoes–amid more puffy vinyl numbers with brand names like “Auditions!”–the owner had emerged from some darkened back room. I innocently asked, “Can I try these in a 38?”

He looked at me a little critically. He made no move to get me the shoes. He gestured toward the chairs in the center of the store and said, “Well, first, let’s measure your feet.”

I was riding the Way-Back Express! I haven’t had my feet measured since I was eight years old, maybe! I got the whole treatment: putting each foot up on the little slanty padded chrome-and-burgundy-vinyl stool, while the guy appraised my polka-dot socks and noted the small disparity between my right and my left. Then he got up and rooted through the various boxes to get me the shoes.

Again with the slanty stool: He held the shoes there to let me slide my feet in, all the while describing the merits of these particular Worishofers–lightweight cork that could be resoled, nifty padding right at the metatarsal (I have a metatarsal?!), breathable foot bed…

Ooh, they were dreamy! And cheap! World’s fastest sale. But of course I couldn’t move too fast–there seemed to be all these little layers of shoe-shop protocol that I’d forgotten since I was eight. Filling out the invoice, learning my name, adding some tips on shoe care. Before I left, he said, “By the way, those are the 39–don’t tell the neighbors!” Yes, I had just been schooled on my own shoe size.

And just as I was checking out, another woman had come into the shop–a much older woman, her hair in a tidy white bob. “I’ve come in for just exactly the same shoes!” she said–totally undermining my conviction that I’d somehow managed to pick the one pair of non-old-lady shoes in the place.

But who freakin’ cares! They’re the best shoes ever! And when the guy mentioned that he’d be retiring in a couple of months and the shop would be closing, my heart nearly broke.

The very next day, I came back with my mom, and bought two more pairs for me, plus a pair with straps for her. The guy measured my feet again–”in case they grew overnight,” he joked. I instantly wondered if he had some kind of foot fetish. But again, I thought: who freakin’ cares! I guess if you work in a shoe shop for 44 years, you either have a fetish to start with, or you develop one. So feel free to fondle my feet a little while telling me random snippets of poetry you’ve read on bathroom walls and stories of old-time Albuquerque (did you know the CBS radio station had its offices in the KiMo Theater, and hosted a monthly live show called “The Neighbor Lady” where women brought in their recipes? I did not–and I want to revive that!).

And I didn’t feel so bad about being a sentimental sap over the store closing–the store I’d known of for less than 24 hours–when the owner told me that the woman with the white bob from the day before had actually started crying when she heard the news.

If you’re the type who tears up over this kind of thing, you can read more here, in the Albuquerque Alibi.

If you’re not, sorry to take up your time. Progress! Future! Change! I’ll be marching forward in my hot, hot old-lady shoes, thank you very much.

So that night I was writing the last post, and it got really late…I very nearly screwed myself. I went out to the restaurant that’s in my guidebook that’s known for staying open late. But they were just closing. They sent me to a newer bar on the south side of town. I raced down there, and as I was walking in, I passed a couple of people leaving. “Wow–we just closed Taos down,” one said to the other.

At the bar, there were two stragglers and some guy who was maybe in charge. No. No food, he said. When I asked where I might eat something this time of night, he laughed and said, “Wennn-deee’s!”

I didn’t want to resort to fast food yet. I consulted my own guidebook once again, and called the Alley Cantina, which recommend for a burger during the day. Lo! They were still serving food after 10pm!

Let me just say, every time I type in a phone number for a Moon guide, I grumble. “Rough Guides doesn’t require the phone number for every damn bar!” I think. But then I consider, well, suppose someone left their credit card behind or something…I suppose it would be handy to have the number to call.

And now it turns out it’s very handy for saving the actual author’s starving ass on a too-late Tuesday night. I raced over to the Alley Cantina (back on the other side of town), and entered with trepidation. This is the place that is traditionally the last stop on the Taos bar crawl, with the chaos you’d expect. Fortunately on a Tuesday, there wasn’t much crawling, though there was some very effed-up French hippie dude with a bad goatee who seemed to have to become that night’s mascot. Phillippe/Felipe was weaving around doing things like sticking a paper napkin to the guitar player’s forehead while he continued to strum and sing his country covers.

I sat alone at a table and ate my green-chile cheeseburger (first on the trip!) and drank a microbrew. Can I just give a shoutout to the waitress who, when I asked whether I should get the burger or the meatball sandwich, said, “Hamburger, definitely. The meatball sandwich doesn’t sell much, so it’s not fresh.” Now that wasn’t so hard! Why do namby-pamby waitstaff say, “Ohh, they’re both just delicious! I don’t know which to call my favorite!” I tipped the ass off that girl.

Near the end of my meal, some guy came up to my table and said, “Can I just ask you–were you at Joseph’s Table last night?” Turns out he’s the bartender there. In that way that only fellow restaurant people do, he asked me what I’d eaten. Like my waiter, he was delighted over the liver choice. Then he asked what I was doing eating at the Alley Cantina, of all places, and I explained how I’d fucked up–and that I’d even been thinking of going back to Joseph’s Table again, just for the trout.

“Oh, the trout! That’s an amazing dish!” he said. Shit! What I wanted to hear, in that case, was “Meh–trout’s fine, but whatever…” Suddenly my green-chile cheeseburger wasn’t so satisfying.

So next day, I left Taos, having eaten nearly everywhere I wanted to, and when I got close to Santa Fe, I was really surprised at the size of the place. I’d been in Taos only three nights, but had already gotten into the holed-up-in-the-mountains vibe. Mike, the Joseph’s Table bartender, had scoffed when I mentioned I had to go back to Albuquerque–what could I possibly want from that urban hellhole?

Then I was in the midst of cramped, bustling, so-craaazy-huge Santa Fe, waiting at a light in all that traffic, and who should I see walking down the sidewalk but a woman I’d seen at the Japanese bathhouse the week before. Hilarious. I wanted to shout, “I’ve seen you naked!” out the car window, but then the light changed. Santa Fe seemed pretty cozy and intimate–too intimate–right then.

Now I am in that giant metropolis they call Burque. I spent the morning out in Los Ranchos and Corrales, though–that’s “the ranches” and “corrals” in English, and it’s just as rural as it sounds. Horses, sheep, goats. Irrigation ditches running from the Rio Grande. I toured a beautiful farm/historic inn and soaked up new urbanism and architecture talk. Then I had a kick-ass plate of enchiladas, and I bought a bike.

Yes! Not on the research schedule at all, but Stevie’s Happy Bikes (4583 Corrales Rd.–tell ‘em I sent you!) was right there across from Perea’s Tijuana Bar where I ate lunch, and I wandered over to ask if he rented bikes. While there, I couldn’t help notice a Raleigh mixte–I didn’t even know Raleigh made such a thing, and it’s the first time I’ve seen a mixte that wasn’t French, complete with annoying French threading, etc., which Peter refuses to work on. So my chic rust Raleigh “Rapide” is getting popped in a box and shipped to NYC. My invoice from the store is stamped with a goofy bike-riding cartoon–a happy biker indeed.

And very happy to be in the big city!

Since yesterday, I have been embroiled in and fascinated with Kohnstamm Kontroversy… Fortunately it landed on a couple of days when my research schedule has been relatively light. My main challenge in Taos has been catching up on all the new restaurants (ha–I typed ‘restrooms’ first by mistake…perhaps also true). I carefully charted out which ones were open for brek, which for lunch, which dinner–and on what days. Seeing how Sunday and Monday are major closing days, it wound up being a little like an LSAT puzzle to hit them all. I mostly had it worked out, but then I was so busy blogging this morning that I missed breakfast, and now everything’s messed up again.

But last night I ate dinner at an old standby: Joseph’s Table. Joseph Wrede made a huge splash here when he opened his restaurant. He was one of the first chefs in the state to really push for local, organic ingredients; he was a Food & Wine hot new chef in 2000, all that jazz. Midway through dinner last night, I remembered that years ago, during a period in which I was looking for A Big Change, I had actually briefly fantasized about chucking my NYC life and moving back here to work at his restaurant.

I went last night not because of this ages-old restaurant crush (like I said, I’d forgotten I’d even had it) but because I’d heard lots of mutterings that the place had gone downhill. Wrede is notoriously flaky–or something, I don’t know, but a lot of deals just don’t work out for him…he was supposed to run the restaurant at El Monte Sagrado, he opened a bakery cafe a couple of years ago, and now I find it’s already shut. So I could believe he’s not really steering the ship away from the rocks at Joseph’s Table.

But, dude, I am here to say: the place is just fine! Oh man. And it was especially heartwarming after my Coyote Cafe experience.

True to form, I drank a couple of glasses of Lillet (first thing on the wine list–how can I not love the place?) and wrote a lot of shit in my notebook while I ate.

It all boils down to: When I eat at a restaurant, I want to be nourished, not dazzled (or, more likely, dulled, as that’s what happens when dazzlement goes awry with too much butter/foie gras/melted cheese/squiggly sauces).

It’s the same standard I set for eating at home, or for cooking for other people in my home.

So why do I go to restaurants at all, then, if I’m so not impressed by your culinary ass-slapping? Well, I go to learn about new flavors. I go to sit in a beautiful room (can the person who painted Joseph’s Table please come do the same gorgeous flowers all over my dining room? And while they’re at it, dust the pussy-willow chandeliers that I want to install, but know are impractical?). I go to enjoy composing a dinner–which appetizer goes best with which main and which dessert? Menu planning is often just as satisfying as the cooking–without actually having to follow through and cook it.

And I go to eavesdrop on other people. Last night was Dining with the Almost-Stars. I did a double-take when I saw Fabio at the next table. Then I saw he had bangs, and I just knew the real Fabio would never compromise his locks in such a way. At the table on the other side, a couple of Afflecks from Massachusetts were complaining to their companions about how people so often misspell their name Asslick–once for a funeral, no less! I have a little more sympathy for Ben now, knowing what he must’ve gone through in school.

I perused the menu. And I did something so genius I can’t imagine why I’ve never thought of it before: I asked for the dessert menu right up front! There’s nothing I hate more than being presented with a half-assed, uninspired dessert menu and realizing I could’ve eaten more savory dishes. Or–let’s be honest here, as it’s more often this way–getting a drop-dead gorgeous list of sweets and realizing I never should’ve ordered an app and a giant main.

So I sat there with my various pieces of paper. It was pretty easy to pull together. Desserts looked good, so I just went for two apps: warm kale sauteed with shallots and a tomato dressing, and a plate of pork liver (from a local farm) in a lemon-caper sauce.

I got the kale because it’s still damn cold here, but I need vegetables. I got the liver because Peter hates it so I never cook it at home. When I ordered it, the waiter practically did a little dance. The best way to endear yourself to the restaurant staff is to order the weird thing on the menu. You can bet they don’t give a shit when you get the roasted token, I mean chicken. And slabs of meat–you already know what a steak tastes like, and there’s nothing a chef can do to make a good steak taste better than just grilling it mid-rare and sprinkling some salt on top. I can do that at home. But something like liver (or the sweetbreads I ordered the other night, at a steak, seafood or steak-and-seafood kind of place), you know the chef has put a lot of thought into how to make that tasty.

And I ordered a glass of Lillet. Drinking my Lillet with my plate of lovely crispy, curly kale, with my wedge of sourdough Frenchy bread and butter on the side, I felt like I could be at home. After a week on the road, that in itself was a treat.

Then my liver came. “If you’re a liver lover, you’re just going to adore this!” said my waiter, with a flourish. I told him I hadn’t eaten liver in a long time, actually, so it was a really special treat.

When I said that, I wasn’t even thinking of the last exact time I’d had liver. But as soon as I had a bite, I remembered. Actually, no–it was the second bite, which I combined with a little spinach leaf from my mixed-green garnish.

The last time I ate liver was in those weeks right after my heart surgery, when Karine and Tamara came to California and dedicated themselves to raising my red-blood-cell count through home cooking. I’m practically crying just thinking about it now. Fucking fantastic friends. They made me chicken-liver-and-spinach salads up the ying-yang. Lillet would’ve gone great with that too, but I couldn’t drink with all my pain meds. Within a week of applying the special leafy-greens-and-liver diet, my blood was back to normal, and I was sleeping a few hours less out of the day. I went outside and walked around the block. The sun glimmered down and the birds sang in the trees.

I am a liver lover because I was raised on it. It was one of those genius fancy-on-food-stamps meals my dad would cook, in the same vein as on-sale steak with homemade french fries and nothing else. “Never let it get overdone!” he’d always proclaim as he seared the liver quickly in the skillet. (And he’d go–and still goes–”Aaaaaagh!” in his signature way when he encountered it overdone in restaurants–or even recalled such an undignified encounter.) A little salt, and that was it. No onions, or I don’t remember any. It was rich, and cheap.

My pork liver would’ve made him proud. I think it must’ve been chilled right up till it hit the super-hot pan, because the outside, the thin edges, were wonderfully chewy, but the inside was almost jelly-like it was so rare. Offal-eating can be such a quien-es-mas-macho sort of thing, but I’m not trying to pull that here, I swear. It was just delicious.

Also, it was doused in a lemon-caper sauce. Now why have I never thought of that? This is what I mean when I talk about learning something new by eating at a restaurant. The lemon brightened it up in the most lovely way, and the capers must’ve been the nice wee salt-cured ones because they looked like they’d exploded when they hit the hot fat in the pan. After I cleaned my plate, I actually ate one of the stragglers right off the tablecloth, where it had landed during my initial omigod-this-is-so-amazing eating frenzy.

I cleaned my plate, and I felt great. I felt nourished–not just from the iron coursing through my bloodstream, but from the fact that someone had concocted this lovely dish for my express delight. For me, the liver lover. I could feel the spirit of home cooking in every bite.

In a swoon, I looked at the dessert menu again. But I’d already decided–the Guinness ginger cake. And another glass of Lillet. It arrived looking like a cupcake, topped with fluffy whipped cream. It was delicious. I ate every bit, and actually did not feel painfully stuffed.

I even felt a twinge of regret at not ordering more. I reconsidered my restaurant schedule for the next day–it would only be a small loss to the greater research plan if I came back the next night to try the risotto cake and the trout with trout roe, and that bay-leaf creme brulee… (Note that I was not thinking thoughts remotely like this at the Coyote Cafe. I was thinking, “Haul this tired, butter-coated ass to bed.”)

On my walk home, I mean to my hotel, I realized my dessert choice hadn’t been random either. During the Great Red Blood Cell Boost of 2006, I finished all my meals with a big slab of gingerbread made with iron-rich blackstrap molasses.

Amazing, in retrospect, that I didn’t get sick of any of these things–greens, liver, gingerbread–or associate them with trauma and never eat them again. Now that’s the power of food cooked with love.

—-
PS: I completely forgot to mention: this all came in at LESS THAN HALF THE PRICE of my Coyote Cafe dinner. I put that in caps not because I’m a bargain-hound, but because usually I don’t even notice what things cost–and this really struck me. (This probably makes me a bad restaurant critic, but I think of my occasional restaurant outings as an extension of the genius Grocery Store Diet & Budget articulated by some lovely houseguests last year: scrimp on everything else, but let yourself get whatever you want at the grocery store, and you’ll be just fine. Plus, it’s all in the name of research, and making me less cranky about my job at the end of the day.)

PPS: I’ve spent so long typing this post that I’ve now missed dinner hours at the place I’d meant to go tonight. Hm. Joseph’s Table is still open. Tempting. But I don’t want to go and have an only semi-wonderful meal this time, and leave on a lower note, know what I mean?

I would love it if some random visitor to this site (since there are so many at the moment) knew how to fix my damn comments. Anyone? I’ve emailed my site host (Yahoo–boo) and of course they’re no help, and I’ve trawled every help forum I can find. Internet, send me an angel.

Thank goodness, the eminently reasonable World Hum has published a setting-the-record-straight interview with Thomas Kohnstamm.

It’s very tactful of them to entitle it “The Firestorm around ‘Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?’” and not “The Shitstorm…”

Again, I feel like Thomas is just the extreme version of all of us guidebook writers, or at least of me. This, I can really relate to:

Do you just have to know when to cut your losses?

It’s always hard to surrender. I went into each project with the best of intentions and each time went through the long process of attrition, guilt, freak-out and the eventual bruised acceptance that I would not be able to cover everything in the way that I had planned or hoped. Usually when you look at your backpack and want to cry over the prospect of repacking it once again, you know that you are getting close to your breaking point.

So damn true. In the last few days of research, and again during the writeup, I find myself having to chant “Next edition! Next edition!” over and over again, just as a reminder that it’s not the end of the world that I haven’t got the last scrap of info on the last, tiniest town at the end of the smallest dirt road.

There’s also a good point in there about the difference between writing a guide to the ass of nowhere and writing a guide to a city. In my first post on this whole issue, I intentionally cited my first job for Rough Guides as an overwhelming and impossibly funded venture. But that wasn’t my first guidebook job at all–in fact, I’d already written Moon Metro Amsterdam, a noble first-edition venture that I believe is languishing on just a few store shelves somewhere. Sure, it was a trial by fire to write a million 30-word reviews completely from scratch, and fit them all into an amazingly tight format. But it was fine–I stayed in a single apartment in Amsterdam, a city I already knew very well, for several weeks. When I realized I’d forgotten to get a scrap of info, no problem–I just hopped on my bike and went out and tracked it down.

My Yucatan trip, by contrast, required me to change hotels–and towns–nearly every night, and once I was over on the Gulf coast in Campeche, and realized I’d forgotten to check something in Playa del Carmen, well, too late, toots. That’s the kind of trip that drives you round the bend, and I honestly can’t imagine doing that kind of a book to new territory at this point in my writing career.

I had a truly excellent time working on the Cairo chapter of Lonely Planet’s Egypt book last summer. I allowed myself a full month to research. My husband showed up for part of it. I only changed hotels three times. I had time to talk to lots of interesting people and thoroughly research everything. That job really gave me fresh inspiration for guidebook writing–but it also confirmed that if I’m going to take on any future jobs outside my regular beats, they should be in cities. To that end, I’m working on an Amsterdam guide for Lonely Planet this summer–and I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve gotten two more links emailed to me today:

First, Lonely Planet’s rebuttal to the Thomas Kohnstamm comments, on BBC. This is slightly surreal, because they’re taking the line that there aren’t any factual errors in Thomas’s guidebooks. Elsewhere, there’s a lot of insinuation that Thomas has made a lot of his own book up, and actually did not do such a bad job on his LP books as he says. So, wait–because he admits he’s a plagiarist and a fraud, he must be lying? There’s a bad circular logic that I can’t even parse into words.

(Also make sure to listen to the audio clip–there’s a quote from Thomas where he actually sounds reasonable and normal, unlike everything else salacious. It’s true: we do look at other guidebooks, especially when we discover we’ve failed to write down the bus schedule to Oxcutzcab, say, and we’re sitting in our apartment in Queens and have no other way of finding something out. Also, it’s interesting to hear Tony Wheeler stammer a bit. And to hear a British person apologize for the vulgarity of the word “screw.”)

This leads me to the other link, a comment on Amazon.com entitled “Boycott this book please!”

This post is infuriating, because the guy is now assuming any guidebook with errors must’ve been written by someone who was too busy getting it on with waitresses to actually do the research.

But, hey, I hate to break it to you, dude: All guidebooks have errors! All guidebooks list campgrounds that have closed! And not because they were plagiarized from a 1968 guide (huh?).

It’s because the world of tourism moves fast, and guidebook publishing is so freakin’ slow. It usually takes about six months to edit a book, then another six months to get it printed. (Lonely Planet moves a smidge faster, and Rough Guides sometimes can too, even though it took a huge step backwards by moving to an even slower printer in China.)

I’m doing research in New Mexico right now for a book that will be on store shelves next April. A year from now. Even in NM, where change comes slowly (unlike, say, in Playa del Carmen), that means there will be many restaurants that will have closed, many B&Bs that will have changed hands. There’s nothing I can do–except maintain my update websites (www.moonsantafe.com, www.moonnewmexico.com, www.roughguideyucatan.com, www.cancundirections.com), and hope the readers of my books actually find them. (Moon and Rough Guides aren’t too keen to promote these sites, because they’re only for these books–no other writers do them. So it looks weird and random if only one book in the series has this “feature.”)

The other option would be to do what Frommer’s (I think–or is it Fodor’s?) does, and make a policy of including only businesses that have been open more than three years. But we all know what that gets you: a Frommer’s guidebook! Which is so goddamn boring and well-trodden that it’s not even worth reading.

The solution isn’t too hard. We already have a brilliant way of getting information to people quickly–almost instantly, in fact. It’s called the Internet.

Lonely Planet is making a big push to put its information online–this will be a big step forward. Its current “Pick ‘n’ Mix” option is clever–buy the PDF-format chapters you want from a mega-book like the South America guide and print them out yourself. Now if they can just implement a process for keeping the info updated more frequently…

Rough Guides, incidentally, does have its books online, but for some reason they’re behind some un-Googleable firewall, so no one even knows this. Also, they don’t get around to putting the new editions up until months after they’ve come out in stores, so there’s often a window where the online information is much older than what you can get in a hard copy–which no one expects, and of course it’s all undated.

Moon is making a move to put books online. This is fine and smart. It would be really smart if they take my fully edited and proofed manuscript that’s produced six months from now and put that online right then–so all the information will be available six months sooner than the hard copy.

What I’m really getting at, though, is that Lonely Planet’s rebuttal is probably right: There actually aren’t any serious factual errors in Thomas’s work. LP has probably combed through and made allowances for the usual closures, bus-schedule changes and so on…and discovered no more than the usual level of mistakes.

Depressing as it is, as I work my little brain to data-crammed jelly, Thomas’s Lonely Planet work is probably no more inaccurate than anything I’ve ever written–especially after it has been on store shelves for a year or so. Righteous Amazon.com Dude is just going to have to live with that…and so am I.

Finally, getting back to the pay issue (as we inevitably do): Stephen Palmer, LP exec, says, “We’re pretty confident that we pay right at the top of the range.”

I suppose they do, at least in terms of cold, hard cash. There are other factors–do I get copyright? Royalties? How helpful are editors? Will people freak if my manuscript is late? Do I have to make sure the formatting is flawless?–that change that flat number.

But the end result, even if they’re paying “at the top of the range,” is that they’re not paying a wage that anyone can live on, at least not for more than a few years in your mid- to late 20s. So Lonely Planet has to churn its authors every few years–that’s fine, as everyone wants this job–but it also means that there are going to be plenty of newbies on the road who totally underestimated what the job entailed (as Thomas did) and the money involved, and get a little desperate. And the books are going to suffer.

(I sound like I’m slagging off LP a lot, but in fact, they are the most organized and transparent organization I work for. It’s really commendable. And they really, really make an effort to respond to authors and their gripes–they even organize workshops where authors can get together and gripe to each other and to the company. And they pay on time. This exceptional professionalism makes up a lot for the fact that authors have no guarantee of getting hired to work on the same book–or any book–again.)

There’s a big gap between old-hand guidebook authors–the ones who started doing this in the 1970s and 80s–and the young ‘uns. The old hands remember the glory days when they got huge royalty percentages–even at LP–and could actually feed their families on the money they made.

The younger generation, myself included, cannot even begin to imagine such a situation. We just accept our lot in life as freelancers–this is a highly tenuous field. Given the scope of problems in the world today, I am not calling for a living wage for guidebook authors. This is just not a top priority. But maybe readers who want better guidebooks, like Disgruntled Amazon Guy, can call for it on my behalf.

The world of travel writing is abuzz! Seeing how six different people today have sent me the same story, I feel like I should comment. Here’s what I’m talkin’ about:

Travel writer tells newspaper he plagiarized, dealt drugs

I am in a rare position in that I’m one of the few people who has actually read this book (it comes out April 22, I believe). I also know Thomas Kohnstamm professionally. He was briefly my editor at Rough Guides, and in fact is partially responsible for my getting hired at Lonely Planet–he suggested I apply and put in a good word for me. I like the guy.

So of course I’m not going to slag him off. But I will say that his book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, was clearly not written with me in mind. I even feel a little embarrassed to have read it, since now I know way too much about Thomas’s sex life. It is written for guys in their mid-20s who aspire to being guidebook writers because they think they might get laid and maybe even score some drugs.

Guess what! Thomas confirms that, indeed, being a guidebook author does get you laid! Hey, even I can confirm that it gets you laid, and you know that’s saying a lot.

As for the drugs, well, I’m just not the sort of person people offer them to. So when I started going broke on my first research trip to the Yucatan, I didn’t have a pocketful of ecstasy to unload for some quick cash. (Technical point: Thomas did not sell drugs–he traded them. Honestly, officer, what’s the big deal?)

That’s where Thomas’s book veers away from mid-20s swashbuckling tale of dudeness into cold, hard reality. Guidebook authors get paid jack! I got paid, I think, $2,100 for my first job for Rough Guides. Even with no context, you’re probably thinking this is pitiful. It definitely is. This was so pitiful, in fact, that it’s what prompted Thomas to suggest, a bit later, that I write for Lonely Planet, where the pay is somewhat better, at least on the surface. But, hey, at the time, I was broke, cooking school was looking way too pricey, and the job sounded like fun.

I spent my entire pay on my expenses, as I wanted to make sure I did a good job, so I arranged a six-week trip and Spanish classes, to brush my bilingual ass up. Even in six weeks in the Yucatan, I still did not have enough time to visit everything! I feel like I did a good job on my update, but there were points where I had to tell myself, “OK, I don’t have to pick the best thing after surveying all the options–I just have to be sure that my recommendations are genuinely good.” And then get the hell outta Dodge/Progreso/Motul/whatever and on to the next town, all the while having this horrible feeling that I’ve missed the most amazing thing.

Fortunately, I get paid better now, and I have some royalty deals, which currently don’t earn me anything but have potential and give me a smidge of job security (LP doesn’t pay royalties–a bit more on this later). And I also know the territory I write about. So since I busted ass and visited 800 hotels on my first research trip, I don’t have to do that so thoroughly anymore, and now I can spend a little bit more time in Progreso and figure out what the deal is. (Actually, I still haven’t figured that one out. It’s either desolate, or filled with drunks. Recommendations, anyone?)

Another interesting point Thomas’s book raises: freebies. Halfway through his trip, with about $3 to his name, he decides he’ll try to cut a deal with the owner of the hotel he’s staying in. Hotel owner laughs and says something to the effect of, “Dude–I know you’re the LP writer! Why are you trying to pay me? All the writers before you have stayed here for free!”

This is a huge deal in Lonely Planet-land, because there’s supposedly a no-freebies policy. But if you look at the wording in the front of an LP book, it says writers can’t take free stuff in exchange for positive coverage. You can see the giant loophole, right?

What’s funny about this is that it’s exactly the same policy that Rough Guides and Moon have–even though LP is using the policy to imply it’s somehow better, cleaner, more righteous than these other publishers. My editors at both Moon and RG say, yes, I can arrange free hotel stays, etc. And I do. (No guidebook publisher pays expenses straight up. RG does pay my airfare. LP allegedly pays so much in its flat fee that your expenses should be covered, but that’s not always the case.)

Yes–omigod!–I take free stuff! I take much less free stuff than I used to (and when I say “stuff”, I just mean hotel rooms–I can’t bring myself to schmooze for free food–that’s truly wretched) because after my first trip to the Yucatan, I realized two major drawbacks to freebies: 1) It’s really awkward to extricate yourself if it turns out the place sucks, and 2) hotel owners who know you’re a guidebook author can talk your freakin’ ear off and eat up your entire morning.

Now I find it’s worth it to shell out $25 to stay in a youth hostel, or $40 in a hotel room, just to buy my freedom and quiet time. I only stay for free with people I know and like. But when I was first visiting the Yucatan and New Mexico, staying at a different hotel every night was really the only way to get to know the scene (and I certainly wasn’t paid enough to afford the whole range of hotels I was supposed to be evaluating). Staying at a hotel is really the only way to judge whether it’s good. Me just walking in and seeing that the room is clean is a start, but if the owner is a racist jerk, or the place is infested with bugs, I’m not going to discover that till later that night.

So now I’m very judicious in who I approach for a free hotel room. Usually, it’s just the really ritzy places. I can’t afford to pay my own way there, and of course a tour around the property will leave me stunned with the glamour and beauty of it all. Only if I stay will I figure out if the service really has its act together, or if the sheets are not quite so lovely as claimed. Believe me, I’ve gotten extremely picky about this shit.

Staying in all those free hotels has also gotten me a great network of people to call up and ask random questions of. And they write to me and tell me when things have changed, and I put that news on my update websites, which make even the current books better. Hotel owners are informed, opinionated people who know the place they live very well–but they’re not going to volunteer information unless I stay the night and chat them up. Even though my ethics have been “compromised” by the occasional free bed, I am a far greater expert on the Riviera Maya today than I would have been if I’d done the same job for Lonely Planet and adhered to their so-called no-freebies policy.

(For the record, I did not take any freebies when I covered Cairo for Lonely Planet last year. I didn’t want to argue them on the legal language on my first job out–and, hey, hotels in Cairo are cheap. LP does pay enough that I can afford $20 a night, or at least justify it: over years of doing this job, I’ve learned to put the profit motive aside and just make life good for me when on the road, no matter the cost. Also, as a side note, since LP does not pay royalties or even give you first crack at doing the job a second time, I felt much less invested in the scene, and didn’t bother making long-term connections. I went, I saw a lot of hotel rooms, and I feel like I did a solid job. But I’m not going to keep up on hotel news, or anything else, in Cairo, the way I do for the Riviera Maya or Santa Fe.)

So that’s a long way of justifying the way I do my job. But it is something everyone asks about, so there you have it.

But the real problem is that guidebook writing, when done well and conscientiously, is a really hard job to do for more than a few years. I am feeling the burnout for sure–my head is filled with addresses and URLs and random mental notes I have yet to commit to paper because I’ve been driving all day. I haven’t gotten to write more than 45 words on any given subject in about five years (that’s why these blog posts get so long, probably). I never get a published book review or other major acclaim–I thrive on random emails from readers (few and far between) and feedback from editors (only somewhat more frequent).

Between last November and the end of this July, I will have updated three whole books and written a new first edition. And I will have gotten paid, after expenses, roughly half of what I used to earn as a mid-level magazine editor, and I’m not even adjusting for inflation since I quit that job in 2000. Oh, why be coy? I’m talking $25,000 as opposed to $50,000 and benefits.

In these eight months, I had about three weeks’ vacation, which I recognize is much better than most Americans, but I spent a couple days of that meeting Lonely Planet editors in Melbourne, and I fielded all kinds of queries from other editors on text I’d just handed in, so I wasn’t really off the clock. When I’m on the road for research, I work 18-hour days, seven days a week. When I get paid well and properly, I figure I’m earning about $1,000 a week…which is still sad when I consider I could’ve stayed home and worked a 35-hour week as a copy editor–no stress, leave at 6pm, laugh about “danglers”–and earned the same amount.

But I don’t want to work in an office, so I’m willing to take a pay cut. And I can afford to do this job and not get paid super well. That’s because I’ve become the worst stereotype in the guidebook author field: a writer with a rich husband! Actually, my husband isn’t rich at all–he makes only a little more than I used to make in my salary job–but he does have full health coverage, and that extends to me. That’s the only thing that makes my freelance life possible. I was just feeling like I was getting into the black and not having to freak out about money every month when Peter and I got married. If I hadn’t gotten hitched, I don’t think I’d still be doing the work I’m doing today–or I’d be doing it very, very badly, muttering to myself, “They’re not paying me enough to do [fill in the blank].” But I’m such a perfectionist, I find it hard to say that–and that’s why LP, Moon and RG all have me over a barrel.

So what I’m getting at is I don’t hold anything against Thomas–his book is sensationalist and a little ridiculous, and I suspect he’s making things seem a bit more scandalous than they are for the sake of the press. That quote about not traveling to Colombia for the Colombia book–well, true enough, but I’m pretty sure that was totally with the approval of Lonely Planet. I remember him telling me he’d taken a desk job with them–and complaining that they were too cheap to send him there. It’s actually kind of noble that Thomas will add that to his list of bad behavior, rather than putting it on LP.*

What’s the moral? I guess you could read his book. My real advice (and Thomas’s, I sense), even though it might put me out of a job, is not to be such a slave to guidebooks. You can bet Thomas isn’t the only person who has worked like this (as I said above, even I feel like I haven’t done my job as well as I should have), so you’re probably better off picking your own restaurant rather than one out of a book. I mean, unless you’re using my books! I really, really care about the restaurants, and you can bet I’m not recommending one just because I had sex with the waiter.

Incidentally, I’m also reading another travel media tell-all right now: Chuck Thompson’s Smile When You’re Lying. It’s hilarious. It has a lot less sex in it, or at least sex as performed by the narrator–there’s still a lot of use of the word “poontang”, just FYI in case you’re sensitive. And it makes me absolutely sick about the world of travel magazines.

Which leads me to the other humongous problem with my job: there’s nowhere to take my skill set and expertise to earn more money, except to travel magazines. And then it’s all about the expenses-paid trip, or the freebies from the PR people, or the delicate phrasing so as not to alienate readers or advertisers. I already know from experience that gets so messy–what am I going to do with more free nights at a deluxe Riviera Maya resort? I’ve worked really hard to do my job well and as ethically as possible, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m never going to get rewarded for that.

But Thomas’s book might be a little bit of a shakeup. Lonely Planet does at least review its fees annually, and is looking at them a lot more closely now. If we all get paid a teeny bit better because of his trashy tell-all, that would be great. I might not quit this job after all. And a big paycheck might blot out the terrible image I have in my head of him having a quickie with some Brazilian chick with crazy shoes. (See–I told you the other stuff about guidebook publishing gets overshadowed.)

*Thomas confirmed to me that his quote was taken totally out of context. Interesting that LP’s rebuttal (on BBC–remember, BBC Worldwide now owns a majority stake in LP) doesn’t take any responsibility for the Colombia book either.

**Apologies for comments still being broken. Feel free to email me at zora at rovinggastronome dot com.

***And another thing! Continued commentary in my next post….