Rough Planet

Downside #45

2006-09-08T15:57:00.000+01:00

Practicalities take over from enjoyment

Because there's simply way more of them to think about than there are amazing experiences to be had. So when you do finally manage to track down the ultra-rare last surviving chamae-lemur in the Gobi dessert, and get to see its famous 'fuck-off-I'm-mating' call as it performs an elegant courtship dance involving six leopards, Hitler's buried treasure and unicorn-blood caviar served on Shergar's mane by Elvis and JFK's secret love child, instead of drawing in that awe-inspired breath of gasp you should by rights be feeling down your tingling spine, or at least formulating your bragging rights, all you can actually think about is how the hell you're going to make it out of there in time to catch the last zebu-handcart to the next three hell-forsaken townettes that were originally on your list for the day. Now that's just plain wrong.

Downside #44

2006-07-19T12:21:00.000+01:00

You never get a tan

Or more accurately, you never get a proper tan. Sure, you may spend half your life swanning around countries where it only drops below 45C in an Ice Age, the midnight sun boils eggs and the ozone layer is so thin that small animals get sucked into space, but unless you plan on wandering topless into 101 aghast hotels, restaurants and mosques every day, the one thing you will never get is a nice all-over even brown sheen. And even if you do fit in a bit of beach-lazing here and there, nothing will ever balance out the hideous iniquity of the everyday bitch tan on the parts which do get constant exposure - in fact, after a few years you'll even forego rampant backpacker-groupie-sex just so no-one can laugh/scream/vomit at the contrast between the pasty zombie pallour of your clammy white bits and the black leather melanomic crackling of your sun-fried forearms and neck. The savviest writers simply plaster on the factor 150 and claim to be goths, which of course comes with its own downsides, but does at least obviate the burns, skin grafts and constant whiff of burning pork...

Downside #43

2006-06-17T20:13:00.000+01:00

You get into a tick-box mentality

Well, it stands to reason really; if you're constantly running around all day ticking stuff off maps, lists or in general, it'll come to a point where you approach everything in the same manner. Bus to shitsville - check. Train times - check. That hotel - check. That restaurant - check. Pay check - check. Read to elderly - check. Drown sorrows - check. One for the road - check. Perfunctory quickie - check. Deliver child - check. Find socks - check. Find god - check. Experience amazing emotional moment of heartrending euphoria - check. Remember own mortality - check. Attempt suicide - check. Hospital - check. Therapy - check. Return to work - check. Attempt suicide - check. Check list - check. Tick box - check. Check ticked off tick box on ticked off check list - check. Update blog - check...

Downside #42

2006-06-13T18:04:00.000+01:00

You're never really writing what you want to

Unless of course your lifelong ambition has always been to pen mediocre non-committal paeans to every fleapit dipshit youth motel you ever stayed in every two years for the rest of your miserable coach-tour couch-class life. No, a pound of Momma's best Thai stick says when you first imagined being a writer you still hazily envisaged some romantic ideal of days spent in solitude in some intensely intellectual garrett crafting prose to cast a mirror on the world and ultimately change the way we read, rather than weeks spent hacking at your dyspeptic laptop producing tepid puff-piece copy that even you view with the kind of contempt that would have flared from Mussolini's bulldog nostrils if he had ever come across the Super Mario Brothers.

Fear not though, that novel will come - unfortunately it'll be about you, not by you, and you'll either be unremittingly dead or prevented by law from profiting from your crimes. Better just stick to those bus timetables then, eh?

Downside #41

2006-06-02T15:48:00.000+01:00

Censorious internet cafes

Fair enough, the backwoods yoof of today may need protecting from the great evils of internet sex, internet drugs, internet rock'n'roll and MySpace. I don't. There's nothing worse, after a long day pounding the streets, bars and butts of some godforsaken landlocked Azeri beach resort, than settling into the nearest netshop for a break, only to find some über-puritan guardian programme stops you accessing the rushes of that Iranian snuff porn you're editing, discussing a bit of light sedition or even catching up on your daily finger-fix of Girl With A One-Track Mind. Sorry, but if I believed in parental controls I wouldn't still be on the run from the Mostar Child Support Agency.

Even more disgruntling, as a member of the Fifth Estate you're constantly having to argue for free speech (mainly your own), better distribution for controversial books (mainly your own), and no state monitoring of electronica (especially your own), all on behalf of the dicks who just installed Mary Whitehouse Killjoy 2.1 on your only link to the outside world. As Johnny Cash would say, I'll see them all in hell, damn their eyes, damn their eyes. Of course if there's any justice they won't be able to see me...

Downside #40

2006-06-02T15:41:00.000+01:00

You don't know whether to fit in or stand out

Actually, you don't often get a choice, and it's always the wrong one. In those countries where it'd make your life so much easier if you could just blend in, where you spend 6 years carefully learning every bit of local slang, body and click language, you're hamstrung by the fact you're the only person in a six-mile radius who's not black/white/female/4 foot tall/wearing full purda/American. And when you really want to attract attention, to get some conversation, information or just a bit of help when you're helplessly stranded without an ounce of the relevant currency, lingo or common sense, everyone assumes you're One of Us and breezes past with not so much as a 'ooh, that's gotta hurt'. Or they might ask you for directions - but don't get me started on that again...

Downside #39

2006-06-01T19:08:00.000+01:00

There's no such thing as a 'break'

No siree Bawb. Fancy a month off, a week's R&R, a day kicking back, even a couple of hours off from the grind? Tough. Like all good haulage carriers you just gotta keep on truckin' until your eyelids can no longer hold the weight of the accumulated road dirt and droop like the flaccid member of an alcoholic monk. (Unlike the long-distance Claras of this world, however, the times you're en route are the times you can actually permissibly fall asleep, so at least you don't risk mashing yourself into polyfilla on some Mauritanian bypass flyover.) Every meal, every beer, every nice cup of tea and sit down plays a small part in putting together the cultural 3D jigsaw of wherever the hell you are, and even if you're just going to jam the pieces together haphazardlessly with a hate-gnarled fist later, you still have to be conscious to collect them. The WORK is all around you. You can never forget it. You can never turn your back on it. And above all, you can never rest...

Downside #38

2006-06-01T18:10:00.000+01:00

You can't do anything else

I mean, what else are you going to do? Whether you're qualified for anything vaguely respectable or not (which given the amount of time you've spent in strange corners of the uncivilised is highly unlikely), the fact is there are very few jobs that attract quite the same amount of instant kudos. Forget everything else, how can you possibly walk straight into another job that offers you the same mini-celebrity status? Or more to the point, how can you possibly accept a job that doesn't?

It's not just your kudos, either - your friends will get microkudos just from telling people they know you, everyone you meet gets to tell the folks back home, shopkeepers hang your picture on the wall next to the King, or President, or Bela Lugosi or whoever it's supposed to be. Dammit, handing out your business card is practically a public service. How could you ever give that up? They've got you by the vanity balls and they know it. Bastards.

Downside #37

2006-05-27T17:56:00.000+01:00

You become a bar bore

What, you? Master of continents, trotter of the globe, raconteur, ravisseur and person of the people, an incorrigible ear-bender? Sorry, but yup - sooner or later all that travelling alone will make you so desperate for some sympathetic company that at the first sign of someone being nice to you you'll be drivelling in their uncaring lughole for the next six hours about life, travel, food, sheep, porridge, underwear, your job, how crap your job is, how great you are and why oh why did that Greenlandic turtle-hunter's wife six years ago never return your calls. Eventually you'll get to the point where you instinctively try to avoid yourself every time you see a mirror, by which time there will hopefully be a law allowing barmen to euthanise you on sight.

Luckily the wonders of modern technology can provide an outlet for these tragic urges: it's called a blog. Deposit your woes electronically, kid yourself that someone actually reads it and voila, instant sanity. Sadly this essentially involves replacing people with computers in your life, which means you'll be even lonelier and probably resort to stalking people online, perhaps the only activity in the world more tragic than wanking into your own socks. So if anyone does fancy a chat about, well, me, my Librerian handphone number's [*removed for the sake of public order -Ed.*]

Downside #36

2006-02-02T09:31:00.000Z

You're held responsible for everything

As soon as anyone finds out you're a writer, well, welcome to the world of culpability, my friend. It doesn't matter if all you've actually written was the blurb on the back of the company's inhouse polo club newsletter; long-term travellers in particular will remember the minutiae of every single cent the price was out on that Iranian whorehouse they tried to download their emal in way back in 1902, and dammit, they want answers. You can try explaining all you like that the author of that book was dyslexic, alcoholic, delusional, bald, a compulsive liar, communist and member of the Bush family; you can point out that he's been dead since before they were Bjorn; you can even ring up his widow/widower/sixteen illegible children and make them confess it was all their fault, but at the end of the day you're the one on the spot and you're the one who has to carry their can. The buck stops here, buddy boy, and the only thing you can do is smile consolingly, apologise on behalf of the entire authoring community, and secretly tip a street kid $1 to throw the moaning bastard's bags in the nearest sewer.

Downside #35

2006-02-02T09:21:00.000Z

Time zones

OK, as a travel writer you're probably not much cop at maths (face it, if you could even add up properly you might realise you're actually earning less than the guy who does your laundress's laundry). But come off it, how can working out time zones somehow be so complicated? Calculating a simple adjustment of 9.5 hours between London Alabama and Bognor Regis Indonesia poses more problems to the jobbing author than remembering exactly which bits of your tax return were fictional and which were just made up. It seems the moment you cross latitude 33.7 on your way to the Islamabad Kielbasa Olympics you lose track of where GMT is, how many hours ago breakfast was, which month you promised to call your mother in and what time that Finnish cheerleader said her mafia boyfriend would/wouldn't be home. In fact, the only thing that ever sticks clearly is the time you had your last drink. But then it's always easier to count in seconds than hours.

Downside #34

2005-11-25T17:01:00.000Z

Anything you value WILL be destroyed

When you spend half your existence on the road, it's understandable that you might be tempted to take a few personal possessions and useful impediments to ease your strains and remind of 'home' - after all, even the most tedious turkey-bus journey can be livened up by a selection of happy Russian ballads on your trusty i-Pad or a quick twiddle of the thumbs on some portable Game Child. Don't kid yourself. A few hours of blissful entertainment, abstraction and light relief from the grim practicalities of your stress-related life is no compensation for the extremes of loss, hurt, desolation and deprivation you will feel when your beloved gadgette is trampled underhoof by some idiot mule-handler as you rappel up the north face of the Eider. Cameras and mobile phones in particular contract a peculiar form of travel death-wish previously only found in people exposed to Rosie Perez movies on long-haul flights, flinging themselves into salt water, salt mines and salt cod with electronic abandon. Might as well go with Marx, Buddha and Willie Nelson, divest yourself of earthly trappings and delight in stamping on other people's defibrillators.

Downside #33

2005-11-25T16:53:00.000Z

You always travel alone

OK, so you meet people occasionally. Sometimes you may even like them, love them or spend a couple of days in their company without regurgitating. At the end of the day, though, you are definitively On. Your. Own. Pretty ironic if you're the kind of gregarious gregorian who would actually consider travel a career.

Forget about getting your mates to come with you either - those 'proper' jobs you've been mocking for years now give them such huge incomes and long holidays that they can take exotic adventurous trips to exactly the places you've always dreamed of going, and they won't have to note the number of hand towels, review the drinkability of the jacuzzi gel or field-test the tiger-proofing in matatus. And of course after all those years rubbing it in about your great travellife, it's hardly coincidence that these trips are always timed to clash with your latest forced excursion to the Siberian meat raffles, once again leaving you to lament your karma.

Alone.

Downside #32

2005-10-18T19:27:00.000+01:00

Procrastination becomes your main occupation

Let's face it, when you've just come back from travelling halfway round the back of beyonce in a dugout tractor you're hardly likely to be in the mood to sit in front of your poxy word processor and churn out 100,000 words of chirpy informative text for the sake of all the lucky stiffs who actually get to go on holiday once in a while and may even enjoy it thanks to the slog of your bleeding guts. Suddenly even the most mundane chore assumes a preternatural sense of urgency - washed your hair lately? hoovered under the chaise longue? scraped the barnacles off your grandma's coracle? watched the Parliament channel? trimmed the clumped-up crap whorls from the fetid arse-end of your favourite pet sheep? Well, now'll be the time to do it. While you're at it, might as well change those business cards to say 'Professional Timewaster'. After all, that's pretty accurate whether you finish your work or not...

Downside #31

2005-03-09T19:48:00.000Z

You live in thrall to technology

Your first laptop always seems like an exciting purchase - slimline, seductive, sexy, full of the promise of a world at your fingertips, plugging you in to the universe, shooting your creativity across the globe like fire and reaping bountiful, wristbending harvests of pixellated porn. One technical hitch later, however, you realise this is no benign angel perched on your desk; even the slightest hiccup can destroy years of work, email filth to all your crucial business contacts, set fire to your in-tray or kick you right out of the house just to find a willing internet connection. And then you compound the agony by trying to take the damn thing abroad. By the time the guy in the Entebbe branch of PC World knows you by name, your friendly working tool has become a squat, leering beast of Baal, sent straight from the bowels of hell to enslave you to its every whim. Soon you will be jumping through hoops to keep it happy, from the initial hopeful 'it'll download properly if you hold down F1 with a stapler' to the hysterical endstage of 'don't breathe near it! it can smell your fear!'. Why do you think God threw in that thing about not worshipping false idols? You can bet your neighbour's ass he'd just lost the other 490 commandments from some dodgy prepharoanic Palm Pilot. If religion teaches you one thing, it should be to make sure you always back up.

Downside #30

2005-02-21T15:56:00.000Z

Professional Rivalry

As in every profession, it's natural to keep an eye on how your fellow workers are doing. When you're freelance, though, the element of competition is blown right out of proportion - if someone else has got a job, it means you haven't, which essentially means they'll eat that week/month and you won't. And as every job you get gives you a better chance of getting the next one, you're constantly surveying your rivals to see who's where on the great freelance food chain, trying to spot the gaps, grinding your teeth for every extra notch on someone else's bookshelf, firing off frantic emails for any pitiful hack work that comes along just to try and beat that fucking guy who always somehow gets there fucking first. Of course the ones you do get will then somehow prevent you from taking the next thing that comes along, which will be ten times more exciting, a hundred times better paid and a million rungs up the career ladder, and will of course go to the colleague now known as That Fucking Guy. They should produce figures on the numbers of byline-related murders every year, it'd make interesting reading. But guess who'd get to compile them?

Downside #29

2005-02-15T15:52:00.000Z

Your attention span kind of

You won't realise until you get back from a trip, but the constant travelling, the procession of town after town day after day, the eternal lack of rest relaxation and distraction, will have a stupendously adverse effect on your concentration once you get home and try to write for 18-hour stretches. In fact, generally you won't manage more than 5 minutes before your mind wanders and you resurface two days later having abandoned what you were doing in the middle of a sentence and gone off on some kind of weird tangent not unlike those caused by heavy narcotics use. Speaking of which, did you see that Cocaine programme on Channel 4 the other day? I didn't, but that guy keeping the coca leaves as a carpet in his room in the trailer, not very subtle! You'd think these Colombians would figure something better out. Then again, they're probably chewing their way through millions of dollars every weekend, their teeth must be fucked. Although I guess they won't be feeling their gums much, and it must taste nicer than khat, that mings big-style. And, um, that's the problem with travel writing right there.

Downside #28

2004-12-10T13:16:00.000Z

'Down time' is your greatest fear

Everybody needs some time out, they say. And what better way to get it than working for yourself? Ah, how you used to laugh at those poor saps with their office jobs and 20 days' holiday a year, smug in the feckless whimsy of your new independent existence. Guess what, though - being freelance means that any time you're not working, you're not getting paid. Which means that any time you're not working, you're either scouting round frantically for any means of paying the rent or sitting around feeling guilty for not scouting around frantically for any means of paying the rent. So sooner or later you find yourself obsessing permanently about paying the rent, even when you are working, and end up gently rocking your life away as a nervous wreck. Either that, or shivering in some back alley with the remainder of your worldly possessions, trying to guess who looks like they need a hand job. Who's laughing now, freelance bitch?

Downside #27

2004-11-18T13:00:00.000Z

Supermarkets become a place of refuge

For the happy tribes of Normality, supermarkets are where you go to do your weekly shop, pick up a keg of Value Lager or possibly ram the occasional child with a shopping trolley. For those of us on the road, however, a supermarket can be the nearest thing to home, a solitary island of western commercialism in a wilderness of alien life. Nothing beats wandering into a minimart in the arse-end of Upper Baboon's Crack and finding a lone can of ten-year-old Campbell's meatballs sitting proud beside the millet and mealie worms. Even the vaguest hint of home comforts can be enough to bring tears to your eyes and transform Mr Buyrite into the mother you never call.

Of course, you can actually tell a lot about a culture from what they stock in their supermarkets. If there's an entire aisle for sausages you're probably in Germany; if there's a mysterious absence of bacon chances are you're in the Middle East; and if there's a giant display of shrunken heads in brine you've probably pissed off your commissioning editor. No matter where you are, though, you can count on three universals that will be found in every store, however large or small: the holy triathlon of Haribo, KP and C*ca fucking C*la. Once the profound depression at this realisation sinks in, you really will feel at home.

Downside #26

2004-08-20T16:54:00.000+01:00

You don't just get to travel

Most people's reaction when you start bitching about your work grievances is just to say 'Yeah, but you still get to travel and get paid for it'. Which is a good point. Unfortunately, it's not quite true - you don't get to travel, you have to travel. The moment you sign up you're committed to going to whatever destination's available, to visit places other people tell you to and see sights determined by tourist whim, and all in the knowledge that if you screw up the write-up you not only won't get paid but could be back flipping burgers within the week. There's no free will involved here, it's a financial and existential imperative. An inactive travel writer is like an out-of-work actor, just a busboy kidding himself better things will come along.

Downside #25

2004-08-15T17:50:00.000+01:00

Your photos never have you in them

Not entirely a bad thing, of course; the world can do with fewer inane holiday shots ('this is me in the airport', 'this is me passing through customs', 'this is me pondering the Turkish Question in Crete', 'this is me near a brick', ad et ceteram), and if you were really that good-looking you'd be on telly. That said, some evidence of your presence in a country is always nice, and when you get back from another marathon slog around the swamps of Saigon with nothing but thick sheafs of landscape shots, your friends and relatives will switch off in droves and rush back to auntie's holiday snaps of Bournemouth ('this is me tutting at a taxi driver who said a rude word'). Even worse, the only pictures that do include you were probably taken on the rare nights you met fellow travellers and got extremely embarrassingly drunk with them, so are unlikely to be suitable for auntie, mother, the tabloids or anyone with a weak stomach ('this is me passed out under a camel having my tongue shaved'). Luckily, it's easy to get round this one - make sure you steal local signs on any such drunken nights out, then head to the nearest photo booth once you've recovered. Instant proof, worth every penny.

Downside #24

2004-08-15T17:41:00.000+01:00

You use truly unseemly amounts of massive hyperbole

It's the flipside of not being able to write negatively (see #23) - having to find something positive and interesting to say about every single hotel/restaurant/church/tour etc quickly leads down the slippery slope to talking things up too much, with effusion taking over from objectivity. Before long the good things are amazing, the amazing things are absolutely stunning, the stunning things are probably the best in the world, and even a fairly average, mediocre place becomes the most average, most typical, most stunningly mediocre place in town. Luckily the only people who notice are the ones who pick up guides, head off to cool-sounding bars and then realise you've pinned a whole paragraph of praise on one tiny design element . Oh, hang on - that's your target market you're disillusioning. Damn.

Downside #23

2004-08-14T23:11:00.000+01:00

You can't write negative reviews

Lest you forget: you are not a free'n'easy journalist or columnist paid to spout off about anything and everything. Your role is to describe things and, preferably, to give people an idea exactly why they'd want to visit/eat/drink/stay in whatever you're writing about. If you can't recommend it, cut it, simple as that. So, no matter how shitty a place is, no matter what animals bite you, what waiters tip gravy on you, what tramps you wake up next to, you just can't justify including the scathing, skin-flaying, acid-penned review you've been crafting in your mind for the rest of the week. Worse, you have absolutely no recourse to your habitual first-choice means of expressing disgruntlement or taking professional revenge on the various crappy hands that travelling life inevitably deals you. Even for us hardened frustratees, that's a tough break to handle.

And it's the frustration that's the killer. Imagine the amount of bile that builds up over the course of a single trip, just from having no outlet for the horrible rage of the disappointed writer (it's not like you've got anyone to rant at, either). Combined with all the other petty irritations of life on the road, it's a wonder we don't all burst with swollen humours and other feudal symptoms. Maybe those medieval doctors were right about the leeches after all. Or maybe they just never got a bad review.

Downside #22

2004-08-11T16:33:00.000+01:00

You're always saying goodbye

Any occasional traveller gets used to the two-week round of goodbyes before departure: boozy handshakes for man friends, boozy hugs for galpals, boozy waves for family and boozy tear-drenched farewells for wife, mistress, girlfriend etc. But as a writer, the minute you arrive you have to start saying goodbye to everyone you meet, generally within 24 hours of meeting them. It'd be easier just to buy a T-shirt with 'Hello' on the front and 'Ciao' on the back, and it'd certainly be less emotionally scarring. Given this constant cycle of Freudian abandonment, it's hardly surprising that you won't find many co-dependent travel writers, though after a few years in the game there are plenty who lose faith in human contact, withdraw so much they're practically autistic and may scream when touched. We call them the lucky ones.

Downside #21

2004-08-04T17:00:00.000+01:00

Weights & Measures

There really is no such thing as an international standard, even in things you take for granted. It's one thing going to buy a pair of cheap shoes, asking for size 8 and coming out with the kind of toe-bending mini-slipper that would have Nureyev cringing. It's quite another to go for a haircut, ask for a number 3 and come out looking like a Nazi war criminal with cancer. Of course this is a hazard whenever you travel, but when you're on the job chances are you just don't have the time to check out these little differences first, and by the time the razor's made its first strafing run across your scalp, well, it's a bit late. And when you hobble up to the Siberian border in your miniscule booties, fat man's trousers and gleaming bar-brawl crew cut, you start to realise a) why people send you off to find these things out for them, and b) why David Attenborough always wears the same shirt & chinos. On the plus side, at least you won't look much worse after a few nights in jail.