Cassowary Crossing

IT’S A WEIRD WEIRD WORLD
(Or Why Travel-Writing Will Never Be The Same As Travelling)

(c) David Astle

Tramp a strange town, climb the spire, catch a ferry, explore the bazaar and later sink a perky red over a plate of regional renown. Aah, the myths of travel writing.

Give or take a tummy bug, travel is often a delight, a dream-state, but travel-writing is a different kettle of pescado. Make no mistake: the two are separate republics with separate bills of rights. One is tourism, the other, endurism.

Classically, when we travel we ‘leave our troubles behind’. We jet to sun-bleached isles and bob about in the warmer sea. Or we pitch a tent in that ancestral spot and laze. Travel is the flipside of work, its antonym and antidote. Yet introduce a pen, a brief, a deadline and suddenly that fortnight in Fiji is besieged.

Seriously, how hard could it be? That’s the question that gets the rookie travel-writer into hot exotic water. In the same way that running a pub seems a doddle – an impression garnered via your years of empirical research – travel-writing has that outward glow, a deceptive appeal, a hedonistic charm that suckers a score of naïve souls every financial year.

I fell for the carrot recently. The idea was a book – a curiosity guide to Australia – and the research would see me in every corner of the continent, sniffing out facts and taking in the rays. I couldn’t wait to sign the paper. Gypsy mode here I come.

But my hunger to hug the myth made me blind to the realer pitfalls. If only some once-burnt hack (like me) could have written some cautionary feature (like this) to word up the next wave of saps (like you? Never! Read this, and boldly go the wiser.)

UNRAVEL AS YOU TRAVEL

Don’t hope to roam with open heart and busy digicam, aiming to return to the refuge of your office, three weeks later, and write. The mood will be lost. The force and flavour of the trip. Either rely on a diligent journal for later prompts, or go one better and scribble an ongoing draft as you go.

Take David Grann for example, a staffer on the New Yorker. He recently lugged a laptop up the Xingu River in Brazil to input his Amazonian yarn as he paddled. That’s the kind of diligence (read obsession) I’m talking about. As a guide writer, travel is the new work.

In a calendar year I drove 50,000kms around Oz in a clapped out campervan. Every night, after an eight-hour day on the road, I plugged in and told the screen the pebble church I’d seen in Carapooee (Victoria), or whatever oddity I’d visited that day. It was madness with a view – and a whopping petrol bill. In travel-writing you procrastinate at your own peril.

RIGHT PLACE, WRONG TIME

Seasons matter. Whether it’s monsoons in Manila or Rome’s summer lockdown. Last year my sister made the cardinal gaffe of visiting Zurich in tandem with the European Techno Festival. Her memory of the Bahnhoffstrasse is a sea of tin-foil miniskirts and pierced nipples. Fluent in German, the only phrases she needed were “I prefer Nancy Sinatra” and “Which way is out?”.

I went one better – or worse – arriving in Margaret River, the wine nook of southern WA, at the break-up of Year 12, or Schoolies Week in the local slang. Most final-year students know their way around cosines and media-in-society, but have no idea on how to handle a 750ml bottle of Southern Comfort. Not if the hoots and off-key AC/DC ballads were any sign, or the dry retches punctuating the night.

As the student body suffered in earshot I cursed my own homework. Writing this damned book, my plan was to raid each state in a six-week safari somewhere between the ravages of January and horrors of peak season. Drive in, spy, laptop, drive out. For reasons of survival, Margaret River was even briefer. I sped to a creek called Meekadarribee (the only waterway in Oz that twists like a pretzel to flow beneath itself) and vanished.

KNOW THY FOCUS

Lonely Planet pilgrims – those in charge of fact-harvesting on location – drown in detail every day. Scarier still, a prime focus of their brief is accommodation. This means the writer has to sleep in one bed, and imagine sleeping in a dozen around town, calling by the various pensions, confirming tariffs and snooping en suites as a way of life. It’s less a holiday than a furniture inventory, with the sexiness of Laundromats and telephone exchanges reserved for the morning after.

Doing a book on beachside B&Bs, Melbourne author Janelle McCulloch had the added burden of photos. Overnight, the burden got heavier. Her publishers decided the accompanying photos showed too many people. Could we pixel them out, wondered the author. No, we couldn’t. The solution was drastic. For the next three weekends, flying and shooting, McCulloch retraced her steps along the Eastern seaboard in a private version of Groundhog hell.

Rather than photos and queen-size beds, my brief embraced a robot dingo in Tasmania and a whale dick hanging in a Coral Bay pub – on WA’s Ningaloo Reef. Pretty rubbery, in other words. Anything odd was fair game, from a life-size Aztec made of chocolate (Latrobe, Tassie) to a koala hospital (Coffs Harbour, NSW). The two things to keep me sane for 217 days at the wheel were audio-books and a Caribbean proverb: one by one, okra fill basket.

FELLOW TRAVELERS

On a hot day in Yankalilla, 80kms south of Adelaide, I realized my young son didn’t give a toss for the largest glacial boulder in the world. He’d rather go swimming, and who could blame him? It was hot. And rocks are rocks.

I’d entered that age-old trap of mixing family with work and calling the mistake “an enriching experience”. The poor kid had already copped a café made of shipwreck timber and a nude swimming club en route. Dad, please, enough of the curiosity already – let’s go boogie boarding.

George Dunford, a travel writer with Lonely Planet, toyed with the notion of summarizing Singapore in 10 rabid days – and trying to show his girlfriend a good time simultaneously. Just to prove the nomad is a slow learner, Dunford has invited his Mum for the New Zealand reprint – though he’s earmarked that bonding week as a non-work window.

You’ll be glad to know I yielded in Yankalilla. My son got his time in the water. Yet tellingly, from that trip onward, I kept in regular touch with my kids via a stream of wisecracking postcards and crackly mobile chats. I missed home and home missed me.

For the travel-writer, spectacular views are often heartsick tonics. On the road six days out of seven, the project punished both camps.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Poor hands, rich eyes: that’s the way Shakespeare describes travel. By extension, travel-writing is busy hands, tired eyes. Rome or Romania, Uruguay or Uluru, the greatest challenge for a travel writer is to see something fresh.

Homesickness, for starters, will make you look backwards. Like the couple I know who ‘escaped’ their toddler for a fortnight in Italy. By Day Three, the mum was so lost without her kid she spent the duration of a Sistine chapel tour ignoring Michelangelo’s ceiling, and looking almost creepily at a 3-year-old Scandinavian.

Her pain was mine. I missed my daughter’s first tooth, my son’s first wicket. To rub in the salt, I recall a day in Charters Towers, west of Townsville, Queensland. After a day bagging weird stuff I froze in my tracks as the sounds of a young family playing Monopoly escaped a neighbouring caravan. The killer quote was a shrill voice saying, “But I was the wheelbarrow last night!” As God is my witness I wept.

And if tears don’t spoil the travel-writer’s vision, fatigue will. Once in Mullumbimby – the Aquarius enclave of norther NSW, I was so jaded with kilometers I failed to see the local Olympic Pool was named in honour of hometown medalist, Petria Thomas. The fact belongs in an offbeat guide like mine, but I drove past the pool five times looking for a caffeine shot.

Tony Wilson, an Australian writer, succumbed to the same stupor while traveling in Israel. Determined to reach a border village for a good travel yarn, Wilson failed to “see” twin brothers aboard the same bus, both youths bound for compulsory military service. Of course, Wilson the traveler saw them, but Wilson the travel-writer failed to capture them – and possession is nine-tenths the writer’s law.

Nostalgia and exhaustion – you can’t write with them, and yet mortals can’t seem to travel-write without them.

TUESDAY IT MUST BE BELLINGEN

Unless your gig is pure impression – and no hard facts – travel-writing needs to be turned around fast. Deadlines are short and the paradox of haste and care entrenched. Text needs getting out quickly since fares change, hotels upgrade or – in my case – a tooth museum in the Wimmera wheat-belt perishes.

I lay a curse on Harry Potter, whose latest book was in countdown mode for much of my research trek. Consequently, whenever I passed a bookstore, come Bendigo or Broome, a shrinking number of days would be blazoned in the window, anticipating JK Rowling’s next instalment. The tally was a time-bomb for my own erratic scribbles.

Yet the cruelest time-warp was spared for a place called Carcoar, a snoozy gold town southwest of Bathurst, NSW. The day I arrived it wasn’t Carcoar at all, but a town 300kms south called Narrandera. At least, that’s how the shingle read on the general store, and it spooked me. Was I going crazy? Was my map wrong? I ate a jelly snake, two snakes, but the sign didn’t change. Travel-writing was doing my head in.

Twilight Zone music piped through my senses as I entered the store. A lady in mobcap and pince-nez glasses said the crew was on smoke-o. “What crew?,” I asked. “And how come your sign says Narrandera if this is Carcoar? It is Carcoar isn’t it?”

“Not today,” she replied. No? Why?

The culprit was Bryce Courtenay. His airport novel Jessica, a period saga based in Narrandera, was being shot by Channel 10 – in Carcoar. Fact is, if I was traveling, not writing about travel, I would’ve hung around, maybe scored a role as 3rd Grazier in Bridal Party. As it was, I bought a umbug from the mobcap sheila and headed for Young - a cherry town just down the road – to keep my appointment with a three-legged chicken.

[Sydney Morning Herald, February 2006]