Travel article - Bath

So you want to be a travel writer

I was extremely blessed to get one of the last 6 remaining tickets for a Southbank talk by Paul Theroux as part of their ‘Great Thinkers’ literature series this May. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, the recent revelation to me that travel writing may just be up my alley came as a complete surprise and is leading me to pick up and explore writers I have never before been exposed to. I thought attending Paul’s talk might bring more to light about the ‘travel writing’ process. I was wrong.

Unlike most of the people in the room who had accompanied Paul on many of his previous journeys through reading his books, I was a newbie. But also unlike most of the white, middle class, non-immigrant Londoners sat in the auditorium, I could relate to his descriptions of travel as a process of self-discovery; where one could explore not only the places they were moving to, but the ones they were escaping from. I didn’t expect to gain truths about my own life journey so far.

In one of his anecdotes, he recalled how a grown man told him that he wanted to be a travel writer and asked Paul for his top tip.
Paul said, “That’s great. Where do you live?”
“At home with my parents,” the man answered.
To which Mr. Theroux replied, “Son, you need to leave.”
Leaving home is an important event, one that you’ll keep repeating as you travel. There’s the “I’m on vacation kind of travel” with your kids, your partner, your friends and then there’s travel, where you seek to understand the culture and rhythms of a place. Where you are open enough to let yourself inadvertently absorb something of the place you visit.
Paul Theroux explained himself saying that when one stayed at home, people around you asked,
“Why do you want to be a writer?”
“How will you make any money writing?”
“What will you write?”
And the final nail in the coffin...
“Who will want to read that?”
Leaving home can allow you to give yourself the permission to be a writer and to find the space to write. Once away, you always have more perspective about home; you appreciate it better and you can always go back. Whether you’ll be welcomed back when you return is something else.



I sat in the auditorium, my heart beating quicker and thought, ‘This is my life.’ I’ve been away from the idea of ‘home’ for 20 years – and now, I’m preparing to return. I know I’ll be welcomed, but those questions – they still linger there in the same recesses I left behind. I wish it hadn’t taken me 20 years to give myself the permission to write again – indeed, to be creative. But there’s something allegorical to be said about my ‘return home’ that is actually a ‘return to myself’ or at least, the creative spirit within me.

Although the above did cause something in me to stir wildly with resonance, it wasn’t the most profound thing that he said. The most profound (and poetic) was, “Keep in mind that the way one travels, reflects the way one lives their life.” If you travel without trusting in the universe’s provision, without optimistically saying to yourself – things will get better, without expecting a beautiful discovery around every corner – that just reflects that you’re suspicious of people in your life, that you are full of despair and have no hope for the future. Exquisite nugget, I thought.

I noted a host of tips from Paul Theroux’s lips on how to travel and travel writing in general. I’ll list them below for you. Who knows you just might find a nugget to inspire you and God knows we all need inspiration!

1. What is required of travel is the lucidity that comes with being alone.
2. If you’re afraid of being alone, don’t travel (paraphrased from Chekov’s famous line quote - If you’re afraid of loneliness, don’t marry)
3. Just as a fiction writer needs solitude to reflect and write well, a traveller (writer) needs to move around without anyone breathing down their neck asking them to look at that architecture on their right and wondering if they read the map correctly.
4. Pack only the bare necessities – a change of clothes, a bag that fits everywhere (on a bus, a train, a small plane, a crowded car), a notebook and pens.
5. When you’re travelling, you inevitably think about the past. Keep in mind that your baggage goes with you when you travel – your memory comes alive. Be prepared to deal with this. Travel doesn’t necessarily allow you to run away from yourself.
6. If you’re writing a travel book – people want to know about your honest reactions to a place. They don’t want to know how ill you were from food poisoning or how long the queues were for a bus ticket.
7. In any kind of writing, an ‘ordeal’ that someone went through really sharpens the mind. People remember ordeals. Our memory sharpens itself when it goes through its greatest fears. The prose is sharper.
8. Travel is a metaphor for living. If you don’t anticipate or enjoy travel, you don’t enjoy life.
9. You need to travel with a sense of optimism that things will always result in a discovery.
10. Good travellers are great negotiators. If you come from a large family (like Paul does) the last biscuit on the plate at tea-time is never snapped up, it’s discussed. Over-privileged people usually over-step their mark while travelling and cross sensitive boundaries because they don’t know the true art of negotiation.
11. Having a detailed map, studying it deeply, can heighten the anticipation of a trip. Stanfords in London is a fabulous place for maps of all kinds and a rare service that the city of London has to offer.
12. Flying distorts your sense of space and distance. If you want to understand a place, always travel over ground. The mystery of the world is revealed to you when you’re on the ground.
13. Spend two years in a country if you really want to get to know it.
14. When documenting travel experiences: write every day, write everything that happened every 8 to 12 hours, photocopy everything you write and mail it somewhere that it can be retrieved if you lose the original. This kind of discipline separates the writer from the non-writer.
15. Remember that when you’ve been welcomed into a country or a place, you have to return the hospitality and welcome people to your country, place, home.
16. Don’t call attention to your writing by writing in the present tense. Use the past tense so that the characters and stories come to the forefront and people are not admiring or distracted by the writing.

Paul Theroux was promoting his latest book, “The Tao of Travel” which lists 10 top things every traveller should know at the back of the book, which is a compilation of other famous travel writer’s works. He tends to have an honest, dry style of writing but the integrity of his journeying can’t be challenged. His openness to people everywhere he goes, even in conflict torn areas and his observations of humanity are touching and astute.



I’ve just finished ‘The Pillars of Hercules’ which is a lovely book of the Mediterranean countries and portrays the lesser known, non-tourist havens of Italy, Croatia, Greece and others. I was lucky enough to get my copy signed. His most famous travelogue is ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’ which everyone seems to recommend if you’re interested in reading about a railway trek across Central Asia, South Asia and the Far East. And to anyone who has the chance to hear him speak in person, do so. I can guarantee that at the very least, you’ll gain insight into the life of an extremely intelligent, very passionate travel writer.

Travel Writing books I've enjoyed

When I was 10 years old, I fancied myself a poet. Furious mid-night scribbling of soppy lines made me believe that this was what I wanted to write. Five years ago, when I frantically attended every City Lit class on writing that I could, I knew novel writing wasn’t for me. A year ago, half-way into my MA in Creative Writing, I fell headlong into playwriting and submitted a compilation of short stories as my dissertation thesis. By then, I had learned a valuable lesson – ‘Never say Never’ and ‘Always be willing to be surprised by the Universe.’ So, when a friend advised me to submit a few travel pieces to the Times of India, I thought nothing much of it, convinced that it wasn’t my genre. Two published articles later I find myself looking at Travel sections in bookstores and noting down ideas for my very own travelogue.

Besides the bog standard Bill Bryson on my bookshelf, here’s what I have read (and enjoyed) so far –

‘The Virago Book of Women Travellers’ – nuggets of travel writing from various women from 1689 to the present day.
‘The Pillars of Hercules’ by Paul Theroux – a travelogue of his overground journey, taking the long way, from Gibraltar to the southern pillar of Ceuta in Morocco.
‘A Moveable Feast’ by Ernest Hemingway – his memoirs about his time living as an American expat in 1920s Paris surrounded by writers of the time.
‘Out of Africa’ by Isak Dinesen – a memoir of life on her farm in Kenya.
‘Down and Out in Paris and London’ by George Orwell – a portrayal of what it was like to work as cheap labour in Paris (also around the late 1920s, early 1930s) and forage for food and shelter as a tramp in London.
‘Eat, Pray, Love’ by Elizabeth Gilbert – a travelogue of her year of travelling to Italy, India and Indonesia in search of her spiritual self through explorations in food and meditation.
And one of my personal favourites – Simon Majumdar’s ‘Eat my Globe’ – a description of his journey around the globe through food he enjoys and encounters.

This isn’t much compared to my steadily growing reading list of travel writing:

‘The Age of Kali’ by William Dalrymple
‘India in Slow motion’ by Mark Tully
‘Pictures from Italy’ by Charles Dickens
‘The Great Railway Bazaar’ by Paul Theroux
‘Ox Travels’ – by different travel writers.
Anything by Colin Thubron
‘Full Tilt’ by Dervla Murphy
‘The Global Soul’ by Pico Iyer

If you’re wondering what common themes link these choices, here it is – I’m interested in travel writing about India, food explorations while travelling and expatriate life abroad. Send me your own recommendations to add to the list!

My Haiti trip

M.I.N.U.S.T.A.H.

That's the acronym for the UN Peacekeeping force in Haiti. Everytime someone said the word I expected them to break out into a rap song about priests. They're EVERYWHERE. UN Peacekeeping 101 - the force comprises volunteers from all country military or police forces. They are required to wear their country uniforms everywhere off-base with a flag and country name tag onto their left shoulders. I love seeing them congregate in a mixture of countries over breakfast at my hotel terrace, which they did almost every weekend. You also get very used to armed checkpoints and all and any peacekeeping personnel walking around at breakfast with holstered guns and tazers on the ready. Certainly makes coffee-time interesting! The other thing you see everywhere are UN vehicles in almost every car park or bumping around on the non-roads of Haiti. Here's one.

Gingerbread houses


Imagine my surprise when I read on the front page of the Financial Times Sunday edition before even touching down in Haiti about Gingerbread houses that were going out of style in Haiti from lack of resources to update them. Gingerbread houses in Haiti! There's a whole block of Haiti called Bois Verna that's full of these run-down, dilapidated houses. Built in the 1900s to 1950s, no one seems quite sure why they were built. Theories are the influence of the World Trade fair that brought Art Nouveau design to the world (although I don't see the connection between Art Nouveau and Gbread houses myself!) and the influence of US visitors to Haiti. The only other place I've ever had the joy of seeing such unique design is in Martha's Vineyard at the Old Methodist Camp where 300 houses are now standing in Oak Bluffs. Once I read the article, I had to see it for myself. Here are some of my pics - rather bad because of the mid-day light and having to take shots from the street!




Haitian Art


Very popular with the tourists, there are colourful pictures lined up against road-sides in Port-au-Prince, waiting for a sale. The themes are all similar - Haitian landscape or crowds of people demonstrating some aspect of Haitian life. Also unique and beautifully haunting were the dark, flat-iron 2-D works mounted against white backdrops. My hotel had plenty of those - here are some pics.






Taptaps

The mode of transport in Haiti is a pick-up truck fitted with a curved roof at the back that can sit about 10 people in it. They're called tap-taps and in most cases are scarred horrifically or are painted quite exquisitely. Most of them whizzed past too fast for me to catch a photo, but I got one of a parked, vacant tap-tap here.




The Workshop


Of course, the reason I was in Haiti was to train our partners there in advocacy. Here are some pictures from the last day of the workshop of 20 participants excluding translators and other assitants helping coordinate it all. This is the part of my job that I love the most - meeting the partners, getting to know their business and knwoing that I can add some value to improving the already fantastic work they are doing on the ground to help the poorest of communities. Most of our partners work in Education and health but some of them are starting to assist communities in disaster preparedness. Civil society in Haiti doesn't have much of a history of activism or forming a collective voice to stand up for their rights. Three decades of hardened, command and control political regimes will do that to one of the poorest countries in the world. The fact that they were mined out of all their gold by colonials and have now stripped out 90% of their forest cover by the end of the last century hasn't added to the solution for their economic recovery. The coffee industry, which is based on the Arabica bean, is able to meet national needs but Haiti imports most of its food.


As my workshop participants were more than happy to discuss in the most impassioned voices, its the free trade policies of Haiti that are killing any incentives for local production. The room swiftly divided itself into one side that was happy to stand by local production being able to supply existing demand with more government and consumer support and the others saying that there was no way rice production in Haiti could meet the needs of a quickly growing population. If I'd had the time I would have set up a debate and discussion of the two sides of the problem so that the group could decide how they would develop a position on the issue. But there we go - the irony of international development. Not enough money, not enough time and more than enough work to be done. More of that another time, but for now, some pictures of some of the people that made Haiti a real pleasure for me to visit, the workshop participants:





Pictures of Port-au-Prince from a height

The Fourth of July

Here's a few ways to celebrate the 4th of July at the Vineyard, Edgartown-style:

Vineyard Baby

Getting to Martha's Vineyard yesterday was fun but hard work! My friend Corinna and I used almost every means of popular transport to travel by land, air and water - the metro, then a train, then a flight, then a shuttle to the ferry which led to an hour and a half journey in wonderful weather with bracing winds culminating in a couple of slightly seasick girls descending upon Oak Bluffs, MV. We were met with an offer of cocktails on the harbour which worked a treat! The picture is of me on the ferry by the way. Note the wonderful tan which hides the peakiness under my eyes.

This morning was another day of wonderful, sunny weather. Corinna and I took the bus from Aquinnah where her parents have a gorgeous house with a view of Vineyard Sound from their huge front deck, to Edgartown. We had lunch on the harbour there at the Seafood Shanty. I had a wonderful Shrimp and Scallop linguine with a coke and tried a spoonful of Corinna's clam chowder. Here's the linguine! Although the food was wonderful, it was just a great place to be with fantabulous views of the harbour, the water and there was a great bar upstairs. The service was also fantastic, with the floor manager coming around and introducing herself to each table, asking us how our meal was and to let her know if there was any problem.












What followed was a trip to the Vineyard's Museum on School Street. For the price of $7 we spent about half an hour finding out about the Vineyard's rich and varied history from making its money from the arduous industry of whaling in the 17 and 1800s to its African-American heritage, the Wampanaog tribe of native American Indians living in Aquinnah to the influx of the Portuguese in the early 1900s, the development of the Methodist campgrounds in Oak Bluffs into the famous Gingerbread houses to the infamous Aquinnah cliffs that bear evidence of MV's geological history when it was entirely underwater to when it was first made into an island 500 years ago when glacial melt separated the existing island surface from mainland Massachussets. If you do visit, don't miss the Fresnel lens sitting majestically in the frontyard or the headstones of Clare Luce's hens.


We ended out trip at the Vineyard by popping into Mad Martha's for a couple of scoops. Mine was Maple Walnut and Blueberry - both equally made in heaven with huge chunks of walnut and entire blueberries in purple ice-cream. Out of this world! As for the story of how Mad Martha got her name - I'll have to save something for next time!

Venice fever

Yes, its true. Every beautiful thing you've ever heard about Venice is actually true. It is one of the most romantic places on earth. I was never interested in or understood Italian renaissance art until I visited the Academia and saw the works of Titian, Canaletto and Bernini among others. I felt the Titian Blues and understood the fascination with the colour; the mystery behind it. I understood why it is possible that modern technology isn't able to replicate the exact blue from Titian's works. Artistic skill was at its hey-dey than. They were experimenting with art as artists knew it. Cutting-edge, radical and political even though they largely stayed with religious themes or portraits of the powerful Doges.

San Marco's piazza was fabulous not because of the hideously glossy church with its kitch mosaics all over the place but because of the story of what it stood for and represented. The piazza was named because of St. Mark's chapel which carried the remains of St. Mark recovered from Alexandria in Egypt by the Venetians who smuggled his buried body out of the country and through Muslim customs by wrapping it in slabs of pork meat. The chapel was built to house his relics and to give the Doges a place to pray. But as the Venetian empire slowly gained power, the chapel was added to and eventually developed into St Mark's Basilica which stands there today. A testament of the power of the Doges but also their lack of taste in this traveller's humble opinion.




The fun of Venice, if you're lucky with the weather and Maria and I were, is that you can walk everywhere or take the boat-bus (vaporetto) to get to where you want to. We saw the Rialto bridge and rather than rent expensive gondolas, just took vaporettos and I was able to take some great pictures down the Grand Canal. Venice can be expensive, but a bargain if you look out for it. Lunch was standing outside the BEST pizza place ever and for two euros and fifty cents we had huge, hot slices of pizza with cokes while watching exhausted tourists walk past in search of more expensive restaurants to sit down and eat. And for all coffee-lovers out there the best coffee was at the Art-Deco train station for one euro and sixty cents only. Bargain!

Poznan

Back from Poznan and what a ride it was! Literally.....18 hours of train journeys through Belgium and Germany. Poznan is beautiful, cultural and hospitable. The market square is a treat. But, most of my time was spent getting to know the Internaitonal Fair grounds quite intimately. That's where this year's climate change negotiations are being held. From my alarm sounding off at 6.30am to collapsing on my bed at midnight, it was an intensive time of understanding a new language of COP, COP/MOPs, SBIs, SBSTAs, Contact working groups, Articles and sections. What was the highlight? Possibly the NGO party halfway through the negs, where government delegates, NGOs and journalists were all boogeying down on the dance floor at Tuba club. We even had a delegate from the Ministry of the Environment for Brazil waiting in line to get into the club.

Its an amazing experience sitting through various groups negotiatin in plenaries and working groups, informal sessions which are closed to all non-governmental people adn listening to political negotiators wording their positions in language dripping with meaning that is over the heads of people who are new to this world of language. "I must insist Mr. Chairman" basically means "No, I don't accept your proposal. Accept mine or we're in a deadlock." "We need more time to review the proposals put on our table," basically translates into "We are trying to buy more time while we do the math here but if it doesn't add up and we're not happy we are going to do everything in our power to put the brakes on." Poznan will forever go down in history as part of the climate change negotiations. We had a Kyoto Protocol and a Bali Action plan. So maybe a Poznan Plan???

In the end, I'm happy to be back and have a few days rest before getting my flight to Christmas in India. I have to pop off now but you'll hear from me soon - I'll have to let you know how my manuscripts were regarded in the two workshops I'm attending tomorrow. Watch this space!