Writing for Lonely Planet

I got to see endangered langurs in the jungle. And they got to see me, a travel writer, also an endangered species.

I’m happy it’s somehow still a job. Travel writing won't make you rich, but it's one of the most interesting ways you can stay poor. 

During research I went to a pagoda above a waterfall so beautiful it gave me heart palpitations. I ate frogs and snails. I met a 95-year-old village shaman who remembered French soldiers commandeering her house. I climbed karsts in Lan Ha Bay and did cliff dives at sunset.

But I don’t want to write more travel content. This piece is about travel writing as a job. I’m happy for people to think it’s intriguing and sexy, but everyone who works in an office will be happy to know that it really kicked my ass. 

You have to explore the whole multiverse. Go to every place and stay in detective mode, asking endless questions with a notebook in your hand. This feels pretty cool for a few days. But it takes time, and you’re on a deadline. So sleep is the first thing to go. 

I used to travel and not sleep, when I was 22. Now I’m middle-aged, which makes me a geriatric backpacker. Every time I get off a sleeper bus I feel like a partially reanimated corpse.

When I was on the motorcycle I played rainstorm roulette and I always lost, so I was always wet, drifting moodily through villages with a backpack of wet laundry. Sometimes in cities I found accommodations that could wash and dry clothes and that was always better than Christmas morning.

At night I wrote under a mosquito net. I was constantly worried my observations wouldn’t be as good as what other travel writers had written, but I didn’t check because I didn’t want to subconsciously plagiarize any phrases. 

I do know that lazy tour companies plagiarize Lonely Planet though, so I look forward to seeing my phrases in blogs and Facebook ads next year.

Anyway, now the job is done. If I had to do it all over again, would I? Maybe. It was very lonely work. It was many, many days as the quiet sigma male arriving in town at dawn. 

I rested for a few weeks and now it’s time to find the next job. Maybe something more stable, if such a thing exists in this weird new world.

Lonely Planet began when a couple in the 70s went overland from England through Asia and printed out their stories and stapled them together. Later they sold the company for $190 million. But the husband still sometimes works for Lonely Planet as a freelancer. The joke here is that even he can’t get a stable job.

This was in Mu Cang Chai. Not pictured are the rice terrace views, which are the best in the world.