Talking travel with a RD editor and former White House correspondent

by Jerry Guo on

I’m here with Carl Cannon, Washington bureau chief of Reader’s Digest. You might ask what he’s got to do with travel. It may have a bit to do with his 15 years covering the White House (and all the travel that goes along with the job), in particular serving as the White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun during the Clinton and Bush 43rd administration.

He’s been a member of a Pulitzer Award-winning team at the San Jose Mercury News, a fellow at Stanford/Princeton/Harvard, and regular contributor to NPR.

Ahh, and he managed to dash off an insightful article on “free vacations” around the US in this month’s issue of Reader’s Digest.

What was your experience like being a part of the White House press corp?

On the White House beat, you are an observer, not a participant, but you are an observer of history in the making. Most White House correspondents keep that in mind, I think, because to cover the stories unfolding in front of you, a good journalist has to know what has occurred before. Learning about this history leads naturally to wanting to explore historically significant places that lay outside the “bubble,” as the protective cocoon of the White House traveling show is called. I did a lot of that, and thus learned a great deal both inside and outside the bubble. I tried to share a portion of that knowledge in the “25 Great Places to Visit for Free” piece in our July magazine.

Did you accompany the president on any of his foreign trips?

I accompanied President Clinton on several foreign trips, including one to Belgium, Ukraine, and Russia. I had never visited the former Soviet Union before, and found myself walking unescorted inside the Kremlin. It was amazing. I also covered one of Clinton’s two trips to Ireland at the height of the peace talks there. When he went to Ballybunion to golf, a couple of reporters and White House guys put together our own foursome. It was wonderful. I traveled event more extensively abroad during the presidency of George W. Bush: One one trip, we went to Sharm el-Sheikh, the resort town in the southern Sinai peninsula; we also went to Jordan and Qatar. I covered the 60th anniversary of D-Day, attended by President Bush, also going to Rome and Paris on that trip; and toured Asia with Bush 43 as well.
The work load for a daily journalist is considerable on such foreign trips–your editors are paying a lot of money for you to be there, so they tend to want a lot of coverage–but there is occasionally time to slip away explore your surroundings. In Sharm, I had a spare hour one afternoon before a Colin Powell press conference, and dashed down to the beach and snorkeled in the Red Sea before racing back up to the press room. I entered the news conference with wet hair, a detail not lost on then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who pretended to be disapproving. He scowled at my attire, but I think he was secretly jealous: he gave me a wink as he left the podium.

On the Asian trip, we ended it up with a day and a half in Hawaii. Many of us made the time count: I found one friend from the L.A. Times to hike to the summit of Diamond Head; and two others, one from the Financial Times of London and the other from Asahi Shimbun, to go surfing on Waikiki Beach. We rented boards from a concessionaire near our hotel, and paid the guy a few bucks to accompany us out to the breakers. We rode several waves before getting back on the press bus for the States.

How did you generate the destination ideas for this piece?

I love traveling in this country, and have done a lot of it with presidents, would-be presidents and other senatorial or gubernatorial candidates on various campaigns–and on many other stories as well. (And on real vacations, too.) I’ve been to most of the places I wrote about, either while on holiday or assignment, and keep a kind of mental road map in my head so that when I travel on a story, I start thinking what is near that place that would be interesting or fun to check out.

What were some places that got left on the cutting-room floor?

One of them was the quarries of rural Indiana. Swimming in them is not usually legal, and can be dangerous, so we left it out, but diving off cliffs into deep, clean water can be exhilarating. Another was the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley located by the old blimp hangar off Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco–that’s where I grew up, and as a kid, I saw that thing every time we went to a ballgame at Candlestick Park. Jimmy Stewart was stationed there when World War II started, I believe. A third site that ended up on the cutting room floor was Navajo National Monument in Northern Arizona. They are all good. A friend emailed me a 26th nomination this morning: she said you can watch the Mormon Tabernacle Choir rehearse on Thursday evenings. I’ve not checked that out yet, but I will try…

How many of the 25 places you mention in the piece have you personally been to? Which are your top three favorite?

Oh, I’ve been to almost all of them–some several times. Let’s see. I have not been to Shanksville, Pa., although I should certainly go there: I was at the White House the day that plane went down with all those heroic people aboard. I’ve been to Ellis Island, although it was my 13-year-old kid on a school trip who did the family search at the immigration center there. I’ve never seen the Iowa bike race, although friends of mine have ridden in it. Nor have I dug for diamons in Arkansas: Carol Kaufmann, a colleague in the Reader’s Digest, Washington bureau, came up with that one. My top three favorites: Well, the Big Hole battlefield in Montana makes me cry when I go there and visualize the Nez Perce being cut down in their tents, so “favorite” isn’t quite the right word. It’s very moving. It’s also on the Big Hole River which is a wonderful fly fishing stream. The Fourth of the July citizenship ceremony at Monticello is so special. My third? Might be the seal pool (or children’s pool) in La Jolla. I cherish that beach.

What’s your favorite museum in DC?

Ah, I can’t choose just one. I like ’em all. The National Portrait Gallery has the portraits of the first 42 presidents of the United States, including Gilbert Stuart’s famous “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington; it has the cracked plate photo of Abraham Lincolns taken near the end of his life, a cast of Lincoln’s hands…and portraits and photographs of all kinds of other Americans. Right now there’s a special one-room exhibit of Katharine Hepburn that includes numerous pictures of her, the actual Oscar statues she won (all four of them) and a video kiosk with clips of some of her movies and interviews. That place is truly amazing. But so is the simple majesty of the Lincoln Memorial, where you can walk in and read, etched in stone the words of the Gettysburgh Address and Lincoln’s second inaugural. Also, I’m still a sucker for the Air & Space Museum.

What about national parks? What are some of your top picks?

If anyone reading this hasn’t ever seen a redwood forest, they need to head to the West Coast as soon as it’s practicable. Those huge trees are something else. In the Reader’s Digest piece, I talk about the tallest trees in Redwood National Park in Humboldt County, Calif., but there are dozens of federal, state, and even some county parks with redwood stands in them, and they must be seen to be believed: My favorite national parks, overall?

Well, when you visit the famous jewels–Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, Acadia, Great Smoky Mountain National Park, Denali up in Alaska–you immediately realize why they are so popular: They are awe inspiring. I’ve been blessed enough to visit all of those, as well as some of the nation’s top state parks. (My favorite state parks are Ano Neuvo Point, Big Basin and Big Sur, all in California, along with City of Rocks in New Mexico and Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod, along with two New York state parks, Saratoga Spa State Park and Adirondack, which has something like 6 million acres.

Also, here are a half-dozen of my other, lesser known, but equally wonderous, favorite national parks, recreation areas, or historic sites:

  • Point Reyes National Seashore (California)
  • Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument (Utah)
  • North Cascades National Park (Washington state)
  • Assateague Island (Maryland)
  • Harper’s Ferry (West Virginia)
  • Lookout Mountain Battlefield (Tennessee)

Finally, here are five parks that I’ve never been to, but very much want to see: Channel Islands (state park) in California, Hawaii’s Volcanoes National Park, Isle Royale in Michigan, Kenai Fjords in Alaska, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, which is one of only two states in America I’ve never visited.

Are you a big outdoors guy? What’s your favorite hike/trek/walk/climb?

I love the outdoor, and indoor, sports. A perfect day might be surfing in the morning in Santa Cruz, California, then driving up to trout fish the Truckee River in the Sierra Nevada Mountains at dusk…before heading into the city for dinner and maybe some cards at a casino in Reno. Actually, I once did that trip, all in the same day. It was tiring, but satisfying.

What’s the best resource for Americans who want to find out some great weekend trip ideas near their home?

Any local hiking club or outdoor outfitter will have information about great local weekend trips. So will AAA, or your local chamber of commerce. This stuff pops up on the Internet pretty easily, too.

Are roadtrips still affordable these days, with the high gas? Any tips for saving fuel on the road?

It’s still cheaper to drive than fly, unless you’re going alone. Tips for saving money on gas? Buy a hybrid. Better yet, ride a bike.

Finally, RD is quite well-known for their reader submitted content. What about travel dispatches or mini-stories? Any ways readers/budding travel writers can participate?

The staff of Reader’s Digest just completed an editorial retreat this week where we brainstormed about new ideas for the magazine. One of them was institutionalizing this travel coverage into something interactive with our readers. It’s not finalized yet, but keep an eye on our website for information on just that kind of endeavor. Meanwhile, happy travels this summer.

Talking travel with the notorious Thomas Kohnstamm

by Jerry Guo on

Thomas Kohnstamm is the author of this year’s most talked about (i.e. controversial) travel memoir, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?,The book centers around his recent days as a Lonely Planet writer on assignment in Brazil–shortly after its release earlier this year, press reports surfaced all around the world that he supposedly admitted to plagiarizing large chunks of his Lonely Planet write-ups and accepted freebies.

Here to set the record straight is the guy himself (oh, and he also happens to be an accomplished writer and traveler).

When’d you get your first passport stamp? Looking back, how do you feel about those earlier, carefree days of traveling? (Before you went pro)

United Kingdom (Gatwick Airport), summer 1989. As a kid, I traveled a lot with my family. We would take long overland trips through Europe and North Africa, staying in hostels, renting short-term apartments and camping. I did my first solo trip at age 17, worked as a volunteer interpreter at the Folklife Festival of the Pyrenees and then ended up traveling around Spain with a bunch of Germans in an old Mercedes ambulance. I loved travel then and I still love travel now, but, back then, things were on a slower pace so I could enjoy the details a bit more.
How’d you land your first LP gig? In your book, it seemed like you suddenly got an envelope while working on Wall Street inviting you to be a travel writer. But you must’ve paid your dues somehow?

In the book I discuss how I had written a phrasebook for Lonely Planet in the late 90s, right after I finished college. I studied Spanish and Portuguese since I was young and had been working as a guide in Costa Rica. I noticed that LP only had a single phrasebook for Latin American Spanish. There is a staggering difference between, say, Argentine Spanish, Cuban Spanish and different types of Central American Spanish, so I came up with the idea to write a specific Costa Rican Spanish Phrasebook. After selling the book to LP, my career took a few different turns, but I still had some contacts at LP when I later looked into travel writing gigs.

How much do you rely on other travel guides when you’re on assignment?

I didn’t rely on them at all during guidebook assignments. You have so much to do and so little time that you are mainly following the last edition of the Lonely Planet. I sometimes looked at other books to see if they had coverage of a town or some other destinations that seemed worth including, but usually LP was more comprehensive than the others in the first place. I don’t write guidebooks any more, but I would assume that blogs and wiki-travel sites are outpacing other guidebooks in terms of providing new information.

Why Lonely Planet? What do you see as the downsides of Fodor’s, Frommers, and Rough Guides?

I have said a number of times that I think that Lonely Planet makes some of the best guidebooks out there and that I still use LP. I was not out to get Lonely Planet. I was simply writing about my experience as a guidebook writer. That said, I see inherent flaws in all guidebooks. My point in my book is that guidebooks should not be followed slavishly or treated as “The Bible” as they are essentially subjective and much of their information is included on a somewhat arbitrary basis.

Lonely Planet still makes a big deal of their “we don’t accept freebies” policy. However, in your book, you seemed to play a bit fast-and-loose with that rule. What’s your take on the policy (NYT Travel section has a strict
“if-you’ve-ever-accepted-freebies-you-can-never-even-write-for-us rule”)? And can you clarify what happened with your LP assignments on that respect?

Lonely Planet states that their writers “don’t accept freebies in exchange for positive coverage.” That is different from “don’t accept freebies” period. That reads to me as no quid pro quo, which is the guidebook industry standard. People can be as sanctimonious as they like, but I know what really happens when guidebook writers are trying to cover so much ground with so little time and so little money. I am just the first to be honest about it. And, as Rick Steves said, if you stay in a hotel you may come away with a worse impression than you would have if you were just there for a ten-minute run through. Maybe you’d notice that there are cockroaches in the bathroom at night or that the train passes right behind the building every couple of hours.

I never set out to accept freebies or discounts. As a matter of fact, you will see in my book that I avoided them until I realized that I needed them in order to be able to complete the massive amount of research. Again, I have never made any sort of direct exchange of a freebie or discount for positive coverage and I say that explicitly in my book.

As for the NYT, I think that their policy is fair. Guidebooks and travel journalism are really different animals and the research processes can barely even be compared.

And just to get this out of the way, can you explain, for the last time to put this to rest, the allegations that you “plagiarized” chunks of your travel writing text. Did you rather mean that you based your research off other guides rather than literally cut-and-paste?

I never plagiarized anything in my life and I never claimed to plagiarize anything. I never based my research off of any other guides. All of the media controversy was based on a sensationalist article from an Australian tabloid that invented the idea that I had claimed to have “plagiarized and made up large sections of [my] books.”
The words “plagiarize” and “make up” were stripped out of a tongue-in-cheek sentence towards the end of my book. The full line reads:

I should be able to write some decent introductions and establish a sense of the place that conveys why a traveler might actually want to visit a destination. That’ll have to be enough-even if I don’t get all of the mundane opening hours and hotel prices right. When it comes to those details, what I can’t plagiarize, I can always make up.

Unfortunately, the journalist used the words like a print version of a sound bite and they were then repeated out of context across news wires and then the blogosphere. Talk about fabrication.

In writing this book, I was impressed by your descriptions of place and characters. How’d you capture that? Did you take extensive notes or did you rely on memory when you were typing out the manuscript?

I do have pretty solid notes, but I rely mainly on my memory. People can say what they will about me, but I do have a good memory.

How do you find that to-be-discovered “it” destination, the place that hasn’t been gushed over in a travel guide. Is your most important source local knowledge? Or is it Internet forums, blogs, etc?

I am a traditionalist on that front, so I use a combination of local knowledge and talking to other travelers on the road. I think that a big part of being a travel writer is being a bit of an extrovert and just talking to as many people as possible and keeping track of when you hear about the same place a few times from different people who aren’t connected to each other.

What are your must-carry travel accessories?

Chapstick, sunglasses, and, these days, (unfortunately) a laptop. I also like to stash some extra $20 bills here and there in case of emergencies.

Any tips to booking cheap flights? How do you go about it?

I usually use kayak.com. Am not much of an expert on cheap flights. I do my best to use miles when possible.

Can you give us a preview of your next book?

It is about a period of time when I thought that I had a Patagonian love child with the drummer of an all-female Chilean punk band. I tried to give up travel writing and step up to the responsibilities of international illegitimate fatherhood — with decidedly mixed results.

Talking Travel with Chuck Thompson

by Abha Malpani on

Aaron recently introduced Chuck Thompson’s new book, Smile While You’re Lying, and today Gadling got the opportunity to have a chat with him. The interview talks about savage travel stories, “Journalistic Tiramisu,” travel-blogging, the authors complaints on the road, and the future of the travel-industry. Enjoy!

We also have 5 copies of the book to giveaway, so stick around after the interview to find out how you can score one for free!

Thank you for talking to us here at Gadling! The content of your book elaborates on savage travel truths that are usually off-limits for general travel-press, what motivated you to make this book happen? What were the challenges you faced in getting this book published?

I got fed up with coming back from intense experiences on the road – and I mean ??intense?? in both good and bad ways – and being muzzled by editors who demanded copy that sacrificed intelligence and storytelling for the sake of advertiser-friendly pap. Not just in travel, but a lot of magazine writing these days is basically glorified PR copy. The stories I told my friends over beers or wrote about in emails never seemed to make it into my bylined pieces. I’d have a story published somewhere and weeks later a friend would call and say, ??Hey, I saw your article on Panama in such-and-such magazine.?? And I’d sort of cringe and say, ??Oh, man, let me tell you what really happened in Panama.??
The challenges were pretty much the challenges faced by any unknown writer with a book proposal-it’s matter of finding the right agent and editor who really “get” your idea in the same way you do. The first agent I sent my proposal to sent back a nasty note telling me how appalled she was by the pitch and my Thailand chapter and how I’d better rethink what I was doing. She actually sent me some photocopied pages from a book on how to be a successful writer. But I remained pretty confident about finding the right people to get behind this. From the time I sent the first proposal out to the book actually getting published took about three and a half years.

What inspired the title of the book and its visual?

The title alludes to the small fibs that travel writers such as myself have to go along with in order to preserve their jobs as travel writers, the larger ones told everyday by the travel industry that perpetuate the accepted myths of the industry, and also the broader triumph of public relations that’s made our mainstream media supplicant to corporate and government spin. As for the cover, it’s meant to express what the book aims to be-fun and entertaining, but also something that shines a subversive light upon travel icons. A lot of people don’t catch it, but if you look at the cover closely, you’ll find a little subversive visual joke hidden in there.

I had to laugh as you tagged travel stories in glossy commercial magazines as “Journalistic Tiramisu,” could you explain this term?

Just the sort of lightweight, drooling, praise-heavy hack copy routinely applied to make mundane places and trips sound “magical” and “resplendent.” Travel writers can’t just walk, they have to “amble” or “meander.” They don’t simply eat, they “dine.” Any store opened within the last two years is “hip,” “hot,” or “happening.” All seas sparkle, all views are breathtaking. My favorite descriptions of this sort of travel reporting are “witless puffery” and “sun-dappled barf,” both of which I heard from other travel writers. (So please don’t present them as mine, even though I wish they were.)

You talk about the travel industry being in a state of dramatic flux and that the “golden age” of international tourism may be drawing to a close; what then, in your opinion, is the future of the travel industry?

There seem to be two divergent opinions on the matter. Boeing and Airbus and other travel and transportation companies-many based in China and around Asia-currently forecast a five-percent annual increase in air travel over the next two decades. This will cause world air traffic to triple by 2030. Imagine three times more babies and three times as many wankers in the middle seat battling you for armrest hegemony on your flight from New York to L.A.

There is a mitigating factor and that is oil. Can we get a stable supply of it out of the Middle East for the next twenty years? Even if we can, is Peak Oil for real and, if it is (which I happen to believe), how soon will it begin causing major problems with mass transportation? Look, you can build all the battery-powered cars you want and probably make ’em work, but getting a fully-loaded 757 off the ground or turning diesel-powered props of a cruise or cargo ship is quite another story. At the moment, there’s nothing even close to alternative fuel for those monsters. Those things aren’t little, plastic four-seaters that need to range 150 miles at a time. They require real power.

The “savage” type of content in your book is often found on travel blogs. How do you think the blogging industry — that warrants personal, raw and original content — will affect the travel publishing industry?

I love blogs. I like contributing to them, reading them, and being a part of them. It’s the best place right now to find authentic travel writing, even if it’s sometimes rough. I wish I had more time to spend reading them. However, I firmly believe the demise of print media has been greatly exaggerated. I don’t expect print to go away in my lifetime, I don’t expect books or magazines to lose their appeal, especially not as long as we continue to condition our kids to read on paper. You know what’s happening with the children’s book market in this country? It’s a gold rush, a boom economy. When I walk into a bookstore and see rows and rows of featured children’s books, I think, “Good for all of us in the print biz.” And just for portability and tactile pleasure and saving my eyeballs, I do prefer books, magazines, and other hard copy to reading on a monitor. I think blogs already are and will become an even larger part of the legit media mix. This is great. But they aren’t going to replace mainstream media anytime soon.

You say in your intro that one of the best things of being a traveler is complaining about the parts you don’t like, I couldn’t agree more! Care to share some of your biggest complaints on the road with Gadling readers?

I know it comes with the territory and I’m generally good-natured and smiley about it, but I absolutely hate being the zoo-animal white guy celebrity in rural Asian and African villages. There’s a smile-when-you’re-lying moment for you-me surrounded by thirty kids yanking at my arm hair with a big idiot grin of affability on my face. I’ve got a bunch of those photos and in every one I was hating life when it was taken.

Another complaint I have is with uppity “travelers” who complain about all the damn “tourists.” We’re all tourists, to a degree, none really any better than the next. If someone wants to spend his travel dollars squatting for two weeks in a bamboo hut in Cambodia, cool. If someone else wants to take her three kids to Walt Disney World in Orlando and stuf
f them with fried dough and Mega-bucket Dr. Peppers, as far as I’m concerned, that’s just as authentic an experience, whether they enjoyed it ironically or not.

What is the worst thing that has happened to you on the road?

I guess having all my money-$1,200-stolen in Thailand. I attempted to turn this into a humorous story in Smile When You’re Lying, but it was absolutely horrible when it happened and I was not thinking at the time how enriching an experience it was. In fact, I was sort of panicked. I was on an island and couldn’t even get off to make a phone call for help for lack of ferry fare. Wandering around that island starving and begging for help was lonely and miserable and embarrassing.

The biggest travel myth in your opinion?

That places are dangerous and people are scary and out to get you. I’ve been to a lot of cities and countries I was repeatedly warned not to go because it was so dangerous. Muslim-rebel territory in Mindanao in the Philippines. The Congolese jungle. Caracas. Wherever there are people, there’s normalcy. People go to work and school, they buy food at the market, they make dinner, they love their families, they’re generally kind or at least civil with strangers. I’m not talking about legitimate war zones, which are different, but for the most part, the paranoia of many people about international travel is grossly unjustified. People who don’t travel to these places think that those of us who do are adventurous and brave. But you go to these places and you see what a lie that is. And you come home and smile about it. What the hell, let ’em think you’re brave. Maybe they’ll buy one of your books.

Thanks, Chuck!

More information can be found at www.chuckthompsonbooks.com

Want to win a copy of the book? It’s easy. Here’s how:

  • To enter, simply leave a comment below telling us about the worst thing that’s happened to you while traveling. Make sure to use a valid e-mail address, or else we’ll have no way to contact you if you win!
  • The comment must be left before Friday, January 4, 2008 at 8:00 PM Eastern Time.
  • You may enter once.
  • 5 winners will be selected in a random drawing.
  • 5 winners will receive Smile When You’re Lying (valued at $15.00).
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