My job: flight of fancy it ain’t

WHEN I tell people what I do for a living, their eyes widen.

Travel writer? Isn’t that up there with fantasy jobs like astronaut, fire-fighter and princess?

They picture me swanning around the world on five-star junkets, or swashbuckling through the jungle like Indiana Jones — a jammy so-and-so on a full-time holiday, the only teensy-weensy catch being that I have to write about it.

Most of the time, I nod in agreement. For me, this is a dream job. I’ve always loved writing and I’ve always loved travelling, so working to build a career that allows me to do both (and get paid for it) seemed like a no-brainer. It took the best part of a decade, but I’ve finally arrived.

Moscow kicked it all off. I visited Russia in the mid-1990s when I was a student. A cousin of mine was one of the many ex-pats attempting to crack the capitalist egg Boris Yeltsin was laying, and I jumped at the chance to visit this great big bear of a country. Exchanging dollars for roubles was the first time I ever saw a million of anything. St Basil’s was covered in snow. I was hooked.

At the start, I had the same vision of travel writing as everybody else. I devoured Paul Theroux and Taras Grescoe, imagining myself venturing to the furthest corners of the earth, on ramshackle trains and dodgy punts, calling in copy via satellite phone to National Geographic.

Some of that has come to pass. Unlike Indiana Jones, I do not tax my 10kg baggage allowance with a gun, a whip and a leather jacket (good luck trying that at airport security), but I have sailed down the fjords in Norway, trekked over volcanoes in New Zealand and got lost in the mountains of Oman. I have recorded a country song in Nashville, and dived with manta rays in the Maldives.

Given experiences like these, especially these days when any job at all is a coup, it seems churlish to discuss the downsides of being a travel writer. Getting paid to travel is a privilege — but it’s also a lifelong exercise in dog-work, deadlines and dodgy internet connections.

Those who envy me never imagine me working at a desk. Sure, travel writers travel. But writing is the bit that takes up most of our time, and I’ve spent far more of my life numbing my butt in front of my laptop or PC, transcribing notes, uploading pictures, checking phone numbers, prices and website details and trying to edit exotic experiences into digestible, 1,200-word features.

Of course, travel also involves getting from A to B. Travel writers can’t teleport. When I fly, I queue like everyone else. I queue to check my bags. I queue to empty my pockets at security. I queue to buy coffee and I queue to board the plane. I just do it more often than everybody else.

Long trips and airport hassles are worth it, of course, for the experience at the other end. But they take a physical toll. Travel can be tough on a family, too. Being away from home is one thing, but there’s also the packing, the deadline-cramming before I go, and the post-trip tiredness when I get back. When my daughter took her first steps, I was wearing out shoe leather in Krakow.

“The myths around travel writing tend to skew to a couple of extremes,” says Rolf Potts, one of the speakers at this year’s Immrama Festival of Travel Writing in Lismore, Co Waterford. Rolf’s travels have included a traverse of Israel on foot, and on a 900-mile adventure down the Mekong.

“On one extreme you have the myth of the permanent vacation, where the travel writer lives this continuously leisured life, flitting around the world and occasionally dashing off prose about how exotic and adventurous everything is.

“The other extreme is the myth of the travel writer as the ultimate hack, this slave to the travel-PR industry, who is always shuffling along on press trips and writing what amounts to ad copy.

“The reality is a lot more complicated. Sure, there can be a degree of leisure to the job, and it’s sometimes a challenge to stay independent from the pressures of the travel industry, but the truth is that most serious travel writers spend an inordinate amount of time writing.

“For every hour we spend someplace exotic, we spend five hours in someplace un-exotic, doing research and labouring over the prose. Success hinges more on how well you write, more than how far you travel. A talented writer can make a stroll to her local strip-mall feel like an adventure, while a death-defying Andean ascent can sound downright dull in the hands of an unimaginative writer.”

It’s great fun, in other words, but it can also be greatly frustrating. I’ve been on safari in Kenya, I’ve eaten free meals under the stars in Fiji, but I’ve also spent months of my life checking phone numbers, looking for Wi-Fi connections in crummy airports, clearing a daily deluge of 2B&B+1D specials from my inbox, and fending off mosquitoes and intestinal parasites in sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s still a dream job, of course. I wouldn’t change it for the world. But like every dream, the bits you don’t remember take up far more time than those you do.

Pól is hosting a conversation with Theo Dorgan and Sara Wheeler at this year’s Immrama Festival. It takes place at 8pm on June 10.

* Follow him on twitter.com/poloconghaile.