Category: Travails of a Guidebook Author

The Kohnstamm Affair: A Long Rant on What It’s Really Like to Be a Guidebook Author

The world of travel writing is abuzz! Seeing how six different people today have sent me the same story, I feel like I should comment. Here’s what I’m talkin’ about:

Travel writer tells newspaper he plagiarized, dealt drugs

I am in a rare position in that I’m one of the few people who has actually read this book (it comes out April 22, I believe). I also know Thomas Kohnstamm professionally. He was briefly my editor at Rough Guides, and in fact is partially responsible for my getting hired at Lonely Planet–he suggested I apply and put in a good word for me. I like the guy.

So of course I’m not going to slag him off. But I will say that his book, Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?, was clearly not written with me in mind. I even feel a little embarrassed to have read it, since now I know way too much about Thomas’s sex life. It is written for guys in their mid-20s who aspire to being guidebook writers because they think they might get laid and maybe even score some drugs.

Guess what! Thomas confirms that, indeed, being a guidebook author does get you laid! Hey, even I can confirm that it gets you laid, and you know that’s saying a lot.

As for the drugs, well, I’m just not the sort of person people offer them to. So when I started going broke on my first research trip to the Yucatan, I didn’t have a pocketful of ecstasy to unload for some quick cash. (Technical point: Thomas did not sell drugs–he traded them. Honestly, officer, what’s the big deal?)

That’s where Thomas’s book veers away from mid-20s swashbuckling tale of dudeness into cold, hard reality. Guidebook authors get paid jack! I got paid, I think, $2,100 for my first job for Rough Guides. Even with no context, you’re probably thinking this is pitiful. It definitely is. This was so pitiful, in fact, that it’s what prompted Thomas to suggest, a bit later, that I write for Lonely Planet, where the pay is somewhat better, at least on the surface. But, hey, at the time, I was broke, cooking school was looking way too pricey, and the job sounded like fun.

I spent my entire pay on my expenses, as I wanted to make sure I did a good job, so I arranged a six-week trip and Spanish classes, to brush my bilingual ass up. Even in six weeks in the Yucatan, I still did not have enough time to visit everything! I feel like I did a good job on my update, but there were points where I had to tell myself, “OK, I don’t have to pick the best thing after surveying all the options–I just have to be sure that my recommendations are genuinely good.” And then get the hell outta Dodge/Progreso/Motul/whatever and on to the next town, all the while having this horrible feeling that I’ve missed the most amazing thing.

Fortunately, I get paid better now, and I have some royalty deals, which currently don’t earn me anything but have potential and give me a smidge of job security (LP doesn’t pay royalties–a bit more on this later). And I also know the territory I write about. So since I busted ass and visited 800 hotels on my first research trip, I don’t have to do that so thoroughly anymore, and now I can spend a little bit more time in Progreso and figure out what the deal is. (Actually, I still haven’t figured that one out. It’s either desolate, or filled with drunks. Recommendations, anyone?)

Another interesting point Thomas’s book raises: freebies. Halfway through his trip, with about $3 to his name, he decides he’ll try to cut a deal with the owner of the hotel he’s staying in. Hotel owner laughs and says something to the effect of, “Dude–I know you’re the LP writer! Why are you trying to pay me? All the writers before you have stayed here for free!”

This is a huge deal in Lonely Planet-land, because there’s supposedly a no-freebies policy. But if you look at the wording in the front of an LP book, it says writers can’t take free stuff in exchange for positive coverage. You can see the giant loophole, right?

What’s funny about this is that it’s exactly the same policy that Rough Guides and Moon have–even though LP is using the policy to imply it’s somehow better, cleaner, more righteous than these other publishers. My editors at both Moon and RG say, yes, I can arrange free hotel stays, etc. And I do. (No guidebook publisher pays expenses straight up. RG does pay my airfare. LP allegedly pays so much in its flat fee that your expenses should be covered, but that’s not always the case.)

Yes–omigod!–I take free stuff! I take much less free stuff than I used to (and when I say “stuff”, I just mean hotel rooms–I can’t bring myself to schmooze for free food–that’s truly wretched) because after my first trip to the Yucatan, I realized two major drawbacks to freebies: 1) It’s really awkward to extricate yourself if it turns out the place sucks, and 2) hotel owners who know you’re a guidebook author can talk your freakin’ ear off and eat up your entire morning.

Now I find it’s worth it to shell out $25 to stay in a youth hostel, or $40 in a hotel room, just to buy my freedom and quiet time. I only stay for free with people I know and like. But when I was first visiting the Yucatan and New Mexico, staying at a different hotel every night was really the only way to get to know the scene (and I certainly wasn’t paid enough to afford the whole range of hotels I was supposed to be evaluating). Staying at a hotel is really the only way to judge whether it’s good. Me just walking in and seeing that the room is clean is a start, but if the owner is a racist jerk, or the place is infested with bugs, I’m not going to discover that till later that night.

So now I’m very judicious in who I approach for a free hotel room. Usually, it’s just the really ritzy places. I can’t afford to pay my own way there, and of course a tour around the property will leave me stunned with the glamour and beauty of it all. Only if I stay will I figure out if the service really has its act together, or if the sheets are not quite so lovely as claimed. Believe me, I’ve gotten extremely picky about this shit.

Staying in all those free hotels has also gotten me a great network of people to call up and ask random questions of. And they write to me and tell me when things have changed, and I put that news on my update websites, which make even the current books better. Hotel owners are informed, opinionated people who know the place they live very well–but they’re not going to volunteer information unless I stay the night and chat them up. Even though my ethics have been “compromised” by the occasional free bed, I am a far greater expert on the Riviera Maya today than I would have been if I’d done the same job for Lonely Planet and adhered to their so-called no-freebies policy.

(For the record, I did not take any freebies when I covered Cairo for Lonely Planet last year. I didn’t want to argue them on the legal language on my first job out–and, hey, hotels in Cairo are cheap. LP does pay enough that I can afford $20 a night, or at least justify it: over years of doing this job, I’ve learned to put the profit motive aside and just make life good for me when on the road, no matter the cost. Also, as a side note, since LP does not pay royalties or even give you first crack at doing the job a second time, I felt much less invested in the scene, and didn’t bother making long-term connections. I went, I saw a lot of hotel rooms, and I feel like I did a solid job. But I’m not going to keep up on hotel news, or anything else, in Cairo, the way I do for the Riviera Maya or Santa Fe.)

So that’s a long way of justifying the way I do my job. But it is something everyone asks about, so there you have it.

But the real problem is that guidebook writing, when done well and conscientiously, is a really hard job to do for more than a few years. I am feeling the burnout for sure–my head is filled with addresses and URLs and random mental notes I have yet to commit to paper because I’ve been driving all day. I haven’t gotten to write more than 45 words on any given subject in about five years (that’s why these blog posts get so long, probably). I never get a published book review or other major acclaim–I thrive on random emails from readers (few and far between) and feedback from editors (only somewhat more frequent).

Between last November and the end of this July, I will have updated three whole books and written a new first edition. And I will have gotten paid, after expenses, roughly half of what I used to earn as a mid-level magazine editor, and I’m not even adjusting for inflation since I quit that job in 2000. Oh, why be coy? I’m talking $25,000 as opposed to $50,000 and benefits.

In these eight months, I had about three weeks’ vacation, which I recognize is much better than most Americans, but I spent a couple days of that meeting Lonely Planet editors in Melbourne, and I fielded all kinds of queries from other editors on text I’d just handed in, so I wasn’t really off the clock. When I’m on the road for research, I work 18-hour days, seven days a week. When I get paid well and properly, I figure I’m earning about $1,000 a week…which is still sad when I consider I could’ve stayed home and worked a 35-hour week as a copy editor–no stress, leave at 6pm, laugh about “danglers”–and earned the same amount.

But I don’t want to work in an office, so I’m willing to take a pay cut. And I can afford to do this job and not get paid super well. That’s because I’ve become the worst stereotype in the guidebook author field: a writer with a rich husband! Actually, my husband isn’t rich at all–he makes only a little more than I used to make in my salary job–but he does have full health coverage, and that extends to me. That’s the only thing that makes my freelance life possible. I was just feeling like I was getting into the black and not having to freak out about money every month when Peter and I got married. If I hadn’t gotten hitched, I don’t think I’d still be doing the work I’m doing today–or I’d be doing it very, very badly, muttering to myself, “They’re not paying me enough to do [fill in the blank].” But I’m such a perfectionist, I find it hard to say that–and that’s why LP, Moon and RG all have me over a barrel.

So what I’m getting at is I don’t hold anything against Thomas–his book is sensationalist and a little ridiculous, and I suspect he’s making things seem a bit more scandalous than they are for the sake of the press. That quote about not traveling to Colombia for the Colombia book–well, true enough, but I’m pretty sure that was totally with the approval of Lonely Planet. I remember him telling me he’d taken a desk job with them–and complaining that they were too cheap to send him there. It’s actually kind of noble that Thomas will add that to his list of bad behavior, rather than putting it on LP.*

What’s the moral? I guess you could read his book. My real advice (and Thomas’s, I sense), even though it might put me out of a job, is not to be such a slave to guidebooks. You can bet Thomas isn’t the only person who has worked like this (as I said above, even I feel like I haven’t done my job as well as I should have), so you’re probably better off picking your own restaurant rather than one out of a book. I mean, unless you’re using my books! I really, really care about the restaurants, and you can bet I’m not recommending one just because I had sex with the waiter.

Incidentally, I’m also reading another travel media tell-all right now: Chuck Thompson’s Smile When You’re Lying. It’s hilarious. It has a lot less sex in it, or at least sex as performed by the narrator–there’s still a lot of use of the word “poontang”, just FYI in case you’re sensitive. And it makes me absolutely sick about the world of travel magazines.

Which leads me to the other humongous problem with my job: there’s nowhere to take my skill set and expertise to earn more money, except to travel magazines. And then it’s all about the expenses-paid trip, or the freebies from the PR people, or the delicate phrasing so as not to alienate readers or advertisers. I already know from experience that gets so messy–what am I going to do with more free nights at a deluxe Riviera Maya resort? I’ve worked really hard to do my job well and as ethically as possible, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m never going to get rewarded for that.

But Thomas’s book might be a little bit of a shakeup. Lonely Planet does at least review its fees annually, and is looking at them a lot more closely now. If we all get paid a teeny bit better because of his trashy tell-all, that would be great. I might not quit this job after all. And a big paycheck might blot out the terrible image I have in my head of him having a quickie with some Brazilian chick with crazy shoes. (See–I told you the other stuff about guidebook publishing gets overshadowed.)

*Thomas confirmed to me that his quote was taken totally out of context. Interesting that LP’s rebuttal (on BBC–remember, BBC Worldwide now owns a majority stake in LP) doesn’t take any responsibility for the Colombia book either.

**Apologies for comments still being broken. Feel free to email me at zora at rovinggastronome dot com.

***And another thing! Continued commentary in my next post….

Drunk Dinner Notes

Because I’m dealing with my incoherent notes from my notebook two nights ago, this post borders on telling you about a weird dream I had. In the same way, it may be just as boring.

My notebook says:

“Here I am at the Coyote Cafe, ground zero of SF trendiness. I am optimistic.”

(The back story: Eric DiStefano, adored/reviled restaurateur of Santa Fe, has bought the place from 1980s celeb Mark Miller, the guy who did haute Southwest way before Bobby Flay. There are no more deconstructed pumpkin empanadas, but the place is hot again.)

On the next page of the notebook, all I see is the word “nosedives.”

What’s odd is that I actually remember that meal fondly–I mean, the taste of it was fine, and there was a general glow to the evening: some amiable chatting with strangers, some occasional expressions of “Mm!” But deep at the core I had some terrible misgivings.

I sat at the “chef’s bar” or whatever they called the counter in front of the open kitchen. A brilliant invention for people eating alone, and also for people who are used to watching TV while they eat, and need some distraction. Another solo woman was sitting next to me. I was planning to chat with her after I’d finished perusing the menu, but then I noticed that she got her short ribs, ate two bites, and then put down her silverware and gestured for the waitress to take it away. She turned to me and swooned about how delicious the food was. I couldn’t think of anything to say to her except, “Then why didn’t you eat it?” Which I didn’t actually say, so I just went back to inspecting the menu until she paid up and left.

After I ate my dinner, though, I was a little more sympathetic to her plight. I saw the gargantuanity of the portions (quadruple-thick porkchops slapped on the grill, three handfuls of gnocchi lobbed in the skillet, etc) and stuck to appetizers. But even so, I could barely finish. The constant smell of fat wafting off the skillets on the saute line in front of me deadened my palate.

The real deterrent to enjoying my foie gras with smoked duck, and my butter-lettuce salad with warm fig dressing was that the grim reality of restaurant line cooking was right there in front of me. So much parcooked risotto, squeeze bottles of sauce, little prepped cups of salmon steak marched before my eyes. So many portions of wasabi mashed potatoes (Whose horrible idea?! Will a food historian please track down the inventor and strangle him with his chili-pepper pants?), green-chile mac-and-cheese and agave-sweetened yams dispensed in massive bowls with an ice-cream scoop. Nothing pleases like soft, butter-laden pap, and seeing it all lined up like that sent me into a spiral of existential despair.

Restaurants have this fiction of “cooked to order.” But what’s really happening is that a number of different pre-cooked or prepped components are quickly combined in a skillet, blasted with heat, arranged on an oversize plate (usually stacked, these days) and topped with minced chives. Voila. Some restaurants do more of this, and some do less, but they all have to do it for simple logistical reasons–or else be like Spicy Mina, where you just know you have to wait an hour while everything’s done from scratch.

And while it may taste pretty good, it just doesn’t seem real–especially when I’m forced to look behind the curtain, from my little perch at the chef’s counter. It’s too obvious this food is not cooked with love–it’s assembled in haste. I’m fine with my meat coming from a living animal–but please do not destroy the illusion that someone has carefully crafted my meal just for me.

This is why open kitchens are a horrible idea. They make people like me kind of queasy. And they make people who don’t know how to cook think that’s the way cooking works. It never occurs to them that someone (someone not cool enough, fast enough or English-speaking enough to work in the open kitchen) spent all afternoon making the gnocchi.

After that, my wine and the high altitude must’ve gone straight to my head, because my notebook moves on from concrete things (the “audible squelch” of the too-gelatin-y panna cotta) to the more abstract.

Here’s where it gets like me telling you about my crazy dream: I devise a grand theory of authenticity, using parallels with current politics! The only thing I can decipher, however, is that The Queen’s Hideaway is the culinary keepin’-it-real equivalent of Dennis Kucinich…except so not vegan, obviously. And Prune is Obama (somehow, it hinges on Goya canned chickpeas, and whether you admit to using them). And my meal at Coyote Cafe was Hillary–nothing really to object to, but trying too hard.

If you’re confused, so am I. Having eaten restaurant meals three times daily since Monday, I am feeling overfed, bloated, greasy, cranky and totally un-smart. Last night I was talking with a painter friend who’s worried that maybe he has effectively spent the last fifteen years huffing solvents, and secretly likes it even as it makes him increasingly stupid. I wonder if I have the same relationship with butter.

In New Mexico in Mud Season

Ah, spring in New Mexico. It has snowed off and on for the last few days. Smells great. Everyone goes around saying, “We need the moisture.” But damn it’s muddy. I nearly got stuck in the Arroyo Seco cemetery today, after I drove in to take photos, and then saw the sign saying “Don’t take photos–violators will be prosecuted.” Lots of slipping and sliding, and furtive looks back over my shoulder as I tried to make a graceful retreat.

So I’m here in Taos (just as, I think, one of my favorite bloggers is here for her wedding…or just was). I hope it didn’t snow on her! It was beautiful in the days before Thursday, though.

To otherwise bring you up to speed:

On my first day on the road, some mountain men of the kind that I think exist only in NM–it’s the ponytails that do it–showed me a weird, dead critter. It was in the back of a pickup truck, which, I just happened to notice, had no license plates. Ah, lawlessness. Ah, critters (it was a ringtail civet, my brother wagers). Ah, hippie hunters.

The desert air is harsh, yo. I spent my first couple days crying, but not because I was filled with emotion over being on my home soil. (Though that particular breed of long-hair does somehow give my heart a little nostalgic twinge. “My people!” I can’t help thinking. Maybe this is as simple as the fact that my dad has a ponytail. He does not, however, have a giant beard, Carhartt overalls and an unregistered 1970s Ford pickup.)

In Santa Fe, I got to meet the fabulous Gwyneth Doland, one of my role models in food-writing style. Can I just say that it’s completely unjust that a woman as witty as she is is going unappreciated in Santa Fe because they’re too damn sincere there? It’s even more unjust that someone who has busted her ass writing for lo these many years (she even ran her own damn magazine, the lovely La Cocinita) does not have agents and editors fawning at her feet. Sure, I may have written 800,000 reviews of beachfront resorts, shrimp taco vendors and old adobe casitas, but I feel pretty damn slack compared with her portfolio of pee-yourself-hilarious columns, compiled over, what, a decade? Again, I’m reminded of the shit you can actually accomplish if you don’t eff around in grad school or your favorite bar-in-the-subway.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, in Santa Fe. I have some scribbled notes to myself in my notebook from two nights ago, but it devolves into such a rambling manifesto that I’ll put it in a separate post.

And, just in case you think I might not complain about my job, I do want to emphasize: Remember, I have to go to all the bad places too. That’s all I’m going to say, because this blog is already veering too close to Great Moments in Regurgitation.

But, wait, I can’t help myself. I’ll just leave you with the following advice: try, try, try to avoid throwing up green chile, whatever you do.

Schmap! Or, why online travel guides are still kinda crappy.

Very randomly, a photo I took, of shiny pink doughnuts, is now included in a rather nifty-looking online travel-info operation called Schmap. Here’s the specific page, a review of Baltimore’s Lexington Market.

I’m not sure how I feel about Schmap. There’s a whole range of travel-planning services online that don’t quite nail it, mostly because they have good structure but ho-hum content. Or even no content: I just today got an email touting Outalot, with a gorgeous interface for what is really glorified directory assistance–at least until all those clever Web 2.0 users show up and write the content themselves.

With Schmap, you get map-based travel planning, so you can see just where everything is at once. But its actual reviews of sights, restaurants and hotels from Wcities is probably uneven (I haven’t checked out more than Baltimore). Wcities provides those little blurbs for a lot of online travel services, so it’s not particularly opinionated, so as to please the most customers. The writers who do it are certainly not well paid, and I’m sure there’s very little attention paid to keeping the information actually up to date. Fortunately Schmap publishes the copyright date along with the review, so you can at least get an idea when it was written. So Schmap is probably great for major sights that don’t change much, but for discovering bars and restaurants, it might get a little long in the tooth.

Schmap points to the impasse we’re at in moving travel info online. Except for a few really devoted and specialized websites (such as Turkey Travel Planner and Luxury Latin America; I write for the latter), the best research and writing still goes into standard guidebooks.

Don’t be fooled by user-generated content: most people on TripAdvisor saying “this is the best resort in the Riviera Maya” don’t know jack, because of course they haven’t been to all the other resorts. (Only I have.) They’re really saying “this is the best resort I’ve ever stayed at”–and what does that mean for you? There’s no way to tell. Apply the same skepticism to readers’ polls in magazines–overexcited travelers, on perhaps their first vacation in years, and maybe even on a paid-for trip to a convention, can launch a perfectly average hotel like the JW Marriott in Cancun onto the top of the Conde Nast Traveler Gold List.

But of course guidebooks lack all the snazzy mapping features you can use on the web, and they take forever to physically print. As everyone knows, even if you get a book hot off the press, the research for it was done at least nine months before. (Or everyone should know–I’m looking at you, the reader who wrote to Rough Guides complaining about lack of coverage of major hurricanes in the Yucatan guidebook that arrived on the shelves just three months after those storms.) With an update cycle of three years, info can get pretty stale.

Lonely Planet has made an effort to speed up the editing and printing time, sometimes shaving off a couple of months on its city guides, and it even updates many of its better-selling guides every two years (with full on-the-ground research, I might add–not phone calls). Meanwhile, Rough Guides now actually take a couple of months longer to be published than they used to, since parent company Penguin decided it was more cost-effective to move all printing operations to China. One company gets it; one company might, but can’t do anything about it, thanks to the smothering print conglomerate it’s part of.

Following its sale of a majority stake to BBC Worldwide, Lonely Planet is actually making a big push to move its content online. Whenever that happens, that’s when we might begin to see something nifty and Schmap-like, with actual content written by reasonably well-paid experts (and not as a filler side gig, as a Wcities commission would be). It should also be kept up to date, if LP continues to invest in its writers.

But I’m still not holding my breath. I feel like people were promising me this kind of stuff back when I was working at a tech magazine in 1999. I gave up on my Palm, 3G mobile phones never really took off, and we still don’t have flying cars. And we still certainly don’t have good travel content online. Somebody text me when the future gets here, please.

Mexico: Cars Suck

Driving through Chiapas I fully realized how dull traveling by car is. Here, where you can rent a car for about US$15 a day and gas is about 70 cents a liter, and that car gets 40 miles to the gallon, it’s hard to argue for taking the bus, especially when you’re more than one person.

But driving takes all the sense of accomplishment out of your day. I was envious of the guy who rolled up at Frontera Corazal and wound up sharing a boat with us to to the ruins of Yaxchilan. He’d planned all the previous day, to get on the combi at the right time, and then to negotiate with the cabbie who drove him the 15km down from the highway. All along, the jungle got denser, the road got worse, the animals along the side of the road got bolder. He got to sit back and soak it all in. More important, though, by taking public transport, he gave up control, which makes it an actual adventure.

By car–ho hum. The road got worse–I chose to drive a little more slowly, whereas the combi driver probably didn’t. It got hot–I gave up my aspirations of keeping it real and turned on the a/c. I arrived cool yet stultified.

But single backpacker dude probably spent the morning dozing on and off, waking up occasionally to see the jungle suddenly thick (whereas I just saw it get gradually denser–not so remarkable). Or maybe he spent the morning having random, stilted conversations with the other people in the combi–tiring, but memorable. He’s been thinking, This is how people really get around in this country.

I was just staring at the road ahead of me, and occasionally checking the map. I was keenly aware that people do not normally get around in an air-conditioned PT Cruiser.

It all just confirms my suspicion that cars suck, and suck the life out of you. I would really love to come back here and actually have time to travel on buses and combis, and wait randomly by the side of the road for hours, and just give up all the responsibility that driving entails.

You’re probably thinking, Silly girl–two minutes of public transport and she’ll be totally eating her words. But no–I have done this, for a week, the one research trip I fucked up and forgot to get my driver’s license renewed. I still think fondly of my weird series of buses and taxis, of the combi I got on where everyone carried a machete, and driver was goggle-eyed to see me. Of bouncing around in the back of taxis, on my way to ruins that no one ever visits. Of popping off the bus at a transfer point and eating incredible snacks from the vendors there.

Next time, next time…

Mexico: The Wrap-Up

So, my phone now speaks better Spanish than I do: I popped in a Mexican SIM card, and all the menus switched over: mensajes, adreses, you name it. Why can’t I do that with my brain?

I contemplate this from my little beachfront prison where I’m not speaking Spanish at all: I’ve been in writing lockdown here in Cancun for these last few days. I’ve always imagined doing this–a little beach time, a lot of writing–but it never works out. I’ve told this plan to people I know in Puerto Morelos so many times–and not followed through–that it’s a little embarrassing. Oh well–if I were in PM, I’d be eating my fool head off all day long and never getting anything done. Through the miracle of Hotwire, I am staying in a relatively posh hotel that is populated with so many large, sunburnt Americans that I really am not tempted to spend all day by the pool. And if I want to eat, I have to walk at least a kilometer. (Mmm–good tortas yesterday, though, overlooking the lagoon! Spongy lunchmeat never tasted so good, slathered with mayo and habanero salsa!)

Yesterday I did venture out for a morning swim (all you Cancun haters: you clearly have never been in the water–it’s unreal, and shark-free!), then retreated to my shady hotel room for the rest of the day. The maids must think I’m violently ill or on a drug binge, as I don’t even let them in to tidy up or replace the towels.

I went out at night to see a movie–the first time I’ve gone to the movies in Mexico, I realized, because I usually don’t have the time. I like to go to movies everywhere, just to see what you can get at the snack bar–here, nothing special, but at least popcorn is called palomitas (“little doves”). I saw a film called Stellet Licht, made by a Mexican director but set in a Mennonite community in north Mexico, in Chihuahua. After I got over the idea that maybe I could understand the Plautdietsch, which sounds enough like Dutch to fool me, I managed with just the Spanish subtitles OK. It helped that those Mennonites are a terse bunch. There were 10-minute stretches where no one said anything, so I had plenty of time mull over the incredibly basic sentence I’d just read at the bottom of the screen, and finally go “Ohhhh.” There were only about 12 people in the theatre: me and a huge whole family, including great-aunts and grandmas. When they left, they were all laughing because most of them had just fallen asleep.

What else has happened? I’ve fully recovered from my little “moment” in Merida. B got off OK and is home in ABQ now. I’ve seen a few more clowns. They’re just a regular part of the street fabric here, like the raving drunk guy and the impossibly small 90-year-old woman and the guy walking by with mangos on a tray balanced on his head. No one bats an eye. The buses are still filled with roving accordion and guitar players.

My last night in Merida, I ran out to check a few last-minute things. I was hightailing it back to the hotel when a guy in a doorway said hello to me. Then he asked if I spoke English. I slowed down my walk and reluctantly said yes. Next thing I know, he’s asking me to translate a poem he’s trying to read, about a Japanese guy giving an anti-nuclear speech in 1957. I have to explain that yes, it says the flowers are smiling, and that’s weird, but it’s poetry, right? After 10 excruciating moments, and me gesticulating more than talking, he lets me go. I think I believe him about only needing help with the first two stanzas.

This morning I walked up the beach to this little coffee place attached to a mall (everything’s attached to a mall here). I vaguely remembered having a nice breakfast there in November. Halfway into my latte and my obligatory cream-cheese-filled pan dulce, my waiter says, “You were here before, weren’t you?” Either they get no customers, or I was much chattier then than I recall. He remembered my whole story–guidebook-writing, etc. Extremely sweet. Especially since he didn’t charge me for my pastries in the end. Aw. Later, walking down the beach and replaying the conversation we’d had in Spanish, I realized I’d answered half his comments/questions wrong. Oh, _he_ would like to speak more languages! Whaddya know–it’s not all about me.

So I’ll be sad to leave, especially as this marks the beginning of a long lull in the update cycle for the Mexico books. I won’t have reason to come back here until late 2009, and by then my cookbook project with Tamara (which is a go, I have not mentioned!) will be out, and who knows what that will bring?

Mexico: I Spoke Too Soon

That thing I said about never being sick in Mexico? Whoa.

Try instead eating a lovely meal at someone’s house (home-cooked food: what a relief, after two weeks on the road). Then you get to the last bite and realize something is Terribly Wrong. You make a break for the bathroom (“Cairo, I’d love to tell you about Cairo! But first, I really, really have to use the bathroom!” I said with all seriousness and calm). But instead you start to black out just about the time you get halfway there–the fridge is the last thing you see, and you put in an extra sprint toward the bathroom door in hopes of getting there on auto-pilot.

You come to, after what feels like the most restful dream-filled full-night’s sleep but was really about 20 seconds, slumped in the bathroom doorway and covered in your dinner, in many forms.

That hasn’t happened to me since I was a kid.

Anyway, to be fair, the kind of sick I got was really not Mexico’s fault. It was completely mine, for stomping around in the noonday sun, with no lunch and only the merest suggestion of Gatorade. I hadn’t been eating because my gut had not been flawless (OK, that’s sort of Mexico’s fault), and I just didn’t want to eat another taco. I was holding out for this delicious homey meal that night. And ooh, baby–I got to enjoy it coming and going!

I have gotten this same kind of sick once before, not in the third world, but in NYC, after tromping around in the noonday sun in the summer, stupidly wearing corduroy pants and drinking nothing but beer. By sundown, after arriving at another long-awaited home-cooked dinner, I had a sip of a gin-and-tonic and promptly yakked. I spent the rest of the night in a darkened bedroom, moaning, occasionally dragging myself out to vomit as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb the dinner party that continued on without me.

Some people might think this last point is demented, but I think it’s essential. The Dinner Party Must Go On! The last thing a sick person wants is for everything to grind to a halt while everyone crowds around and looks on in shock and pity, and then quickly says their goodbyes.

And to my impeccable hosts’ credit last night, they did carry on. Presto, my utterly soiled clothes were in the laundry (what luck! I’d spilled eggplant on my skirt earlier in the night–no need to worry about those oil stains!). I was led to the shower, and given a whole new, cute outfit to wear and an open invitation to all the assorted lotions and products. Then I came downstairs and drank some tea. I went on to vomit a couple more times (demented again, but I actually don’t mind this at all–good thing I like my body, or I would be a class A bulimic), while the lovely lady of the house served my mother dessert.

I got driven home in an air-conditioned car, the non-bumpy route, with bags of assorted things to get me through the night and assurances that a doctor could be summoned if need be. This morning I feel fantastic, and I even ate a teeny bit of the cake from last night.

Now that is true hospitality, and that is why these flawless hosts also run one of the finest B&Bs in Merida.

I’m sorry I had to get so violently ill just to test them, but hey, I’m just doing my job, you know?

Mexico: Chiapas

My lingering fears about Mexico being, well, what Americans are meant to fear about Mexico have still come to naught. People in Chiapas are exceedingly nice. The highway along the border with Guatemala is completely paved and not even traveled by slow- or crazy-fast-moving trucks. Anyone looking for off-the-map adventure down here I guess should be looking to bunk down in an EZLN camp…and I’m not planning to put those details in the guidebook.

I really don’t have any brilliant adventures or insights to share. This trip is going so smoothly in part because B is with me. When your mother’s along for the ride, it makes you pick the safe option more often than not. When I’m by myself, I end up getting into disastrous adventures because I think, “I’ll just do this one last thing before dark…” or “I’ll just save another ten bucks…” or “I’ll just order one more dish, to really test out this restaurant…”

Still, today was not record levels of comfort. I subsisted on nothing but two pieces of toast and a handful of macadamia nuts roasted with chile (OMG–yum! Buy them at the little stand by the entrance to the Tonina ruins–they same little stand that has a propane-fueled espresso machine). And a Coke.

We’re in Frontera Corazal, just having taken a boat up the river to the ruins of Yaxchilan–an amazing ride on the water, then ruins that are straight out of a movie set. I even saw a little bit of a monkey in a tree on the way back. That was on the Guatemala side of the river. Clearly, Guatemala is much cooler.

Tomorrow, back up the road to Bonampak, where now you can rent bicycles to ride up to the site, rather than taking a special combi ride. If I were alone, of course I’d do the bike, and get all sweaty and sunburned and dehydrated. But I’m with B, and I suppose we’ll take the combi instead of riding several miles in the jungle heat. We’ll have another lovely day. Oh, alas.

OK, one observation: People pronounce Google here like it’s a Spanish word. That is, Goog-LAY. Hee hee.

Uh, gotta go. A toad is lurking about a foot from my desk, and won’t stop staring at me. Maybe he’s one of those poisonous ones I’ve heard so much about…

Mexico: Rain in Palenque

B and I were walking around checking out hotels in Palenque today. Actually, we’d just eaten lunch, and I was thinking about visiting hotels. I really, really hate doing hotel inspections–or I hate thinking about doing them. Like so many things, they actually end up being kind of fun and informative in the end, but I never can remember that at the start.

Anyway, first hotel we stopped in was shiny bright and clean–a nice change from last night’s cabana, which was a natural refuge for at least seven distinct specias of Chiapas spiders. Also, a translucent frog–translucent the way geckos are. B saw that and said, Aren’t those the poisonous ones? Always a nice thing to think about right before bed.

Anyway again, we see this nice clean hotel–really, sparkling. M$200 a night (aka US$20). Parking. Continental breakfast delivered to your room. We smile, we take a card, we walk to the door…and the sky opens up. Total deluge. We turn around and book a room. We nap to the sound of rain spattering on the metal roof. It worked out swimmingly.

Except, of course, for all the charming places we visited after the rain stopped, where the people were so nice we actually felt guilty for not giving them our business as well.

We were walking up the main town drag today when a giant parade float went by, covered in red heart-shaped balloons and teenage girls in white leotards and glittery angel wings.

Also, oh yeah, saw yet another clown yesterday.

Back on the subject of hotels: the reason B and I were in the Palenque Spider Reserve last night is that as soon as we pulled into the alleged best cabanas on the road to the ruins and saw one dude with dreadlocks, I just could not bear it. I could already hear the late-night drum circle and the annoying talk about shamans. I put the PT Cruiser in reverse and we hightailed it to the most random, only-reachable-by-car-and-therefore-not-accessible-to-backpackers cabanas we could find.

This reaction makes me think I am no longer qualified for this job. Though it’s not entirely my fault. The reason I cannot go the backpacker route, and instead drive around in a rental car, is because backpacking requires time–and I cannot afford to take the time, or I would never be able to make my book deadline. So I can’t actually live the lifestyle I’m allegedly researching. I like to think I’m not a fraud, but sometimes I wonder.

On the upside, I saw some great ruins today. I heard howler monkeys. I bought a beaded shrimp keychain. I got served more than half a chicken for lunch. And I got to nap on the spur of the moment at a very clean hotel.

Tomorrow: Ocosingo, and some waterfalls. (Or that’s the plan…actually failed to spend any time at the cacao plantations I mentioned in the last post, thanks to some monstrous highway construction, and also lingering over a giant breakfast shake of chocolate milk, oatmeal, granola and every kind of fruit you can think of. You can see how that would’ve slowed me down a little.)