Peter Davis, Lecturer, Creative Writing, Deakin University

Travel writers need to avoid the tourist traps in order to explore rather than promote places.
Peter Davis explores some of the issues and techniques of the craft.

At the Taj Mahal I watched a man who lures tourists from their buses to a position where they can focus their cameras and capture the perfect picture postcard image of that magnificent edifice. This man takes his work seriously. He chalks out two footprints in which each captured tourist can stand. Not only do the tourists do what he demands, they even pay him for the privilege!

Eventually the man caught my gaze and invited me to step into his marked footprints. I refused. He assumed a look of utter incredulity. “If you don’t stand here your images won’t look like this”, he said as he pulled from his pocket that postcard cliché. “I don’t want mine to look like that”, I replied. “But this is how the Taj Mahal must be seen”, he insisted. “This is how everybody sees it”.

I have a name for the interplay between this man and his customers. I call it trap dancing. Sometimes it is funny. Occasionally it gets ugly. But the poignancy of this dance should never be underestimated. It’s a dance that lures the visitor away from the possibility of original ideas or constructs and into the dominant agenda. This represents a fundamental challenge for the serious writer, especially the travel writer. The challenge is to break out of the cocooned experience offered by an increasingly homogenised travel industry. But trap dancing is on the increase. And tourist trappers like the man at the Taj are everywhere. I don’t blame them for what they do. They are simply doing their job. And they do well because so much tourism is about seeking to experience ‘otherness’ without leaving the cocoon of the familiar.

Transforming text into texture is what makes good travel writing. As readers of travel we want more than to be simply informed. We want to be transformed - we want to feel an experience and we want to know what lies beneath. Text that we read in the tourist brochures informs (and often misinforms). But texture has the power to transform. So how does the travel writer obtain texture? Avoiding the trap dance must be a first step. And here lies a problem. Most travel writers are freelance. They have to somehow make a living and travel is expensive. Many writers are therefore easily seduced by PR people into accepting a famil (short for familiarisation) to far flung and foreign places.

There are three fundamental problems with famils. Firstly they are usually so short and so contrived that they rarely afford an opportunity for gathering text let alone any real texture. Secondly, they represent the ultimate embodiment of the trap dance (for example, a famil guide will never reveal the extent to which a resort drains precious local resources). Thirdly, famils are perceived as compromising integrity.

The issue of integrity is the more serious problem. We live in a post cash-for-comment time. We are all more sensitive to the need for high ethical standards. Integrity therefore must be seen to be embodied. For this reason newspapers of no longer publish travel articles from writers who received free transport or accommodation. Such policies mean fewer articles from freelance contributors and more articles from staff writers and agencies.

The freelance travel writer seeking publication in the serious broadsheets (some of the few outlets in Australia for authentic travel narratives), now faces a new challenge - how to pay for expenses? For most freelancers, the rates are so appalling that they barely cover the cost of meals, let alone fares, accommodation or time. It’s going to be even tougher than usual for the freelance travel writers and I suspect many will fall by the way. One solution is to write travel as an ‘add on’ to other assignments This presupposes that the freelancer is able to receive a commission for other assignments such as feature writing or profile writing. Given that travel writing is, after all, a form of feature writing and that the travel writer must be able to observe, research and interview in much the same way as a feature writer, such an assumption is not unreasonable.

So what makes a good travel writer?. In his introduction to The Norton Book of Travel, Paul Fussell claims that the ideal travel writer is consumed not only with a will to know, but also a will to teach. “Inside every travel writer there’s a pedagogue - often a high moral pedagogue - struggling to get out”, he says. He goes on to say that this alone, is not enough. “A commitment to language and to literary artifice must also be there, and the impulse to write must be equal to the impulse to travel”

To this I would add that the travel writer needs an astute sense of self, of other and of place. Good travel writing is, quite simply, good story telling. The most significant journey for a travel writer is the one beyond the cocoon. It’s a journey that demands intense engagement and critical observation.

In the writing course I teach at Deakin University, I give my students an exercise where they have to use their non-regular hand (right handed students use their left hand and vice versa) to write their name, street address, email address and phone numbers. As they do this I ask them to comment on how they feel. The most common words and phrases cited are: uncomfortable, out of place, disconnected, alive, awkward, challenged, powerless and focused. This exercise helps students explore that which is intimate to them - their identity and their place, beyond the realm of the familiar.

Exploration rather than promotion is what travel writing is all about. Sometimes it’s hard to convince editors of this fact. Last year I was on assignment for Lonely Planet in the Andaman islands (in the Bay of Bengal). Beneath the tranquil beauty lies a seriously degraded environment and a highly questionable tourist regime. I wrote a travel piece for newspapers that focused beneath the surface. “I can’t publish this” replied one editor. “I can’t see why anyone would want to go there”. To her credit, she relented.

As a writer who also photographs, I regard the camera as a powerful tool for exploration. Photography also provides wonderful opportunities for collaboration. Last year in a remote Tibetan village I asked if I could meet the oldest resident. I was introduced to 71 year old Tsam Choe. Her story was as textured as her face. “I’ve never left this village” she told me through an interpreter. She used to beg for food but she said things have now improved. I asked if I could photograph her. She agreed. But when I pulled out my camera she became visibly distressed. After some time I learnt that she did not want to be photographed alone. “I want to be pictured with my children”, she eventually said. “Otherwise people in your country will think that I live alone”. Suddenly about two-dozen children made their way into the image I was constructing. And so I photographed Tsam Choe as she wanted to be seen - in her familiar surrounds - not out of place but very much in place. Being out of place while seeing how others fit into place is one of the delights of travel writing.

Peter Davis is a freelance writer/photographer and a senior lecturer in creative non fiction writing and travel writing at Deakin University in Melbourne. He is the co-author and photographer of two books on Asian elephants and a contributing author and photographer to Lonely Planet publications on India. He undertakes short term media assignments for AusAID to document development projects in the Asia Pacific and he leads writing & photography tours to various destinations for Australians Studying Abroad.

davisp@deakin.edu.au