Away on Business

Travel PR tips

2009-07-12T16:25:00.002-07:00

I'd been thinking recently how common it is for journalist friends and colleagues to hold PR people in complete contempt.

On the one hand this may partly be because they don't always get what they want, and perhaps they aren't willing to recognise that they may sometimes simply not get what they want for very sound commercial reasons, such as that what they can offer is not what the destination (hotel, travel company, restaurant, etc.) actually needs. On the other hand PR incompetence is not rare.

Having sat on both sides of the desk (although I've never had anything to do with travel-related PR) perhaps I'm a little more sympathetic. I also remember many times that well-organised PRs have helped me put together trips that have resulted in stories that have been widely published, so all parties have benefited.

Needless to say, I also remember all the little slip-ups that have helped to make things unnecessarily difficult, simply because PR people have failed to do their jobs properly.

I then happened to come across the site 'Pro PR Tips', and the link above is to one tip that particularly caught my attention:

> It’s sad when a PR person makes me want to cover a company less. But it’s not my job to tell company execs when they’re getting screwed by their reps. Advice to CEOs and internal marketing people: Don’t cede your media relationships to your contractors.

The author writes about technology both in print and on-line, but what struck me is that there are individual hotels, hotel chains, and even whole countries that I won't deal with simply because their PR people are so bad.

One major Hong Kong hotel is disappearing from guide books I'm involved in simply because the PR person there tries to negotiate: 'I'll give you an extra night if you guarantee to say...'

'What?' you might cry. 'You mean you'd omit a brilliant hotel I might like simply because you don't like the PR person? I'm interested in the beds, the location, the price, the service, and I don't have to deal with the PR person. Why should you penalize me because the PR person is bad?'

And the answer is because anyway the problem in Hong Kong is never choosing what to put in, but what to leave out, because there are more excellent hotels than there is space. So no one's losing out here, but be assured that if there was little alternative, that hotel would be included anyway. The point I'm making is that here is an example of PR actually driving down a hotel's exposure to its prime target markets. Even if I were forced to include the property, it would never be mentioned in passing in articles, and I would be unlikely to recommend it on-line in other contexts. The PR person's behaviour is damaging that hotel's business. No names to be given here, but let's just say that fashion PR and travel PR are clearly quite different.

I will name the hotel chain I usually ignore, though. It's the Four Seasons. This is because in pursuit of guide book coverage for very widely distributed series indeed, I've twice dealt with properties in this chain and been treated in precisely the same way: My initial email request for access has been ignored until I was either already in the city in question or about to board the plane, and then I've received an invitation to lunch.

'So what,' perhaps you ask, 'is the problem?' Well perhaps, inspired by Pro PR Tips, I'll go on to explain in one of my own series of travel-PR-related tips. Watch this space.

The one country I ignore is because although I've visited it twice, and written about it extensively in Time, the National Post, and assorted local Canadian papers, and happen to like it very much both personally and professionally (entirely different things) my most recent encounters with its current PR people have involved considerable rudeness on their part.

Maybe the key person in question has moved on. But until the destination approaches me again, I'm never going to know. And it's a big world, with many destinations, and more invitations to travel than I can accept.

Since many of the PR people I deal with are in fact civil servants the situation is perhaps different from that of the tech industry, and it's that thought, plus the realisation that more than a decade of experience has left me with a cupboardful of (mostly) friendly advice to offer.

As I said above, watch this space.

Squeaking reaches deafening proportions

2009-06-27T11:03:00.003-07:00

Courtesy of Jon Azpiri, the link is to a blog with a piece on earning US$0.15 per word, except that apparently not all words count, regardless of their grammatical importance. Read it, as they say, and weep.

Several people on the Mexican trip from which I've just returned were writing for absolutely nothing except the subsidised travel itself. One, very courteously, apologised for contributing in this way to the general undermining of rates, although there's little new in this. But I was the only person travelling solely in the expectation of receiving a fee for material to be published, and that's a first.

Those dreaming of making a living from all this should note that US$0.15 per word is starting to look generous.

Everyone's pips are squeaking

2009-06-09T16:37:00.005-07:00

The link is to a Times article revealing that W H Smith, which although only partly a bookshop used to be (and may still be) the UK's largest bookseller, has done a deal with Penguin which means that only Penguin group travel guides will now be stocked.

Publishers I've written for have sometimes regarded persuading W H Smith to stock them as make-or-break for the titles, such was the volume of sales from limited shelf space. Smith's was therefore able to extract truly pip-squeaking discounts meaning that there was little profit if any at all from sales there, which seemed to make a presence there rather pointless. An appearance on the shelves of Smith's amounting to little more than very expensive advertising, but in a form that guarantee the publisher got the absolute minimum yield pre sale. For those (precious few) authors on a royalty, the result was only a few pence per sale.

To gain this exclusive hold on Smith's shelves, Penguin (whose travel guide stable includes Rough Guides and DK titles), has had both to pay cash up front, and to give W H Smith a whopping 72 % discount on the cover price. I can't speak for Rough Guides, but DK doesn't pay a royalty, but rather a flat fee for total rights, so although I've been co-author/editor/consultant on a number of titles this new deal doesn't affect me. But even had there been a royalty it wouldn't have amounted to much. If the book as a £10 cover price, only £2.80 gets to the publisher, and at the very best about £0.28 of that will reach the author. Writing travel guides is more about establishing expertise and credibility than it is about getting fat.

The author of the Times piece rather takes the partners in this deal to task, but there's not much enthusiasm in the way he does it, and he doesn't really have much of interest to say. The travel book market is in a terrible state, and it's up to Smith's, in the best interests of its business, to decide how to get the maximum yield from its shelf space, and the publisher to decide how to increase its market share.

Last year guide book sales in the UK fell between seven and thirteen per cent (according to a piece in The Bookseller), and that was before the recession began to bite. According to this Times piece, in the first four months of this year DK's sales fell by 16.5%, and Rough Guides' by fully 30%. There are probably mass redundancies underway even as I type.

No doubt Penguin sales through W H Smith will rise a little, as those making last-minute purchases at airports and railway stations (where the company is well-represented) will be faced with little alternative. But everyone else will surely quickly learn about the paucity of choice, and will shop elsewhere. Total travel sales at W H Smith outlets sharing high streets with Waterstone's, Borders, Books Etc., and other big chains may well drop however.

But this is all further indication, for those not yet driven away from the thought of travel writing by various postings below, that now is not the best time to be entering the business. In the last few weeks I've seen one travel section I write for regularly simply vanish, and had another frequent magazine client contact me to say that rates were being reduced by ten per cent including on work already commissioned, filed, but not yet actually printed (which is completely disgusting).

In the end, the purpose of travel writing for newspapers and magazines is to keep the advertisements from seeming too numerous, and bumping into one another. When there's less advertising, there are fewer pages, and less demand for text. Leisure travel is one of the first things to go in a recession, and when fewer people are buying travel, travel companies have less money with which to place advertising.

Right now you'd be better to write on living on a budget than on travel. At least until such times as editors realise that a well-written piece about somewhere the reader can only dream of visiting is just as attractive as a nuts and bolts piece about somewhere swamped with overseas visitors.

Personally I'm in the middle of writing a piece on lawn mower racing, and a series of China book reviews.

'Don't like Jamaica...'

2009-06-06T15:04:00.008-07:00

'...I love her.'

Partway through my Jamaican visit this 1970s 10cc tune came back to me, but my Jamaica Tourism Board minder had never heard of it, and even suggested (teasingly) that she thought I was making it up. But this is the 21st century, the small but comfortable hotel I was in (Sunset Resort, on Treasure Beach) had broadband, and by the next morning I'd downloaded a copy of the song, transferred it to my iPod, and gave it to her to listen to over breakfast.

She wasn't impressed, and indeed I hadn't remembered that the whole thing is slightly mocking.

I'm not particularly keen on these trips that introduce me to a country I've never visited before (and in this case a region previously unknown to me). It doesn't seem reasonable that after a week I'm going to come back with something intelligent to say. But of course this is wrongly conceived, since intelligence is about the last thing most (thankfully not all) editors and readers (ditto) want from their travel sections. But there are times when such trips become necessary either to assist the bank account or because editorial interest is turning in a particular direction and stories on a particular region is all that they want.

The whole thing was very poorly handled by Jamaica's New York-based agency, with long lacunae between email replies, a complete failure either to produce story ideas or promote Jamaica in any way despite being invited several times to do so, and final agreement on a trip only reached a week before it was taken, and long after one deadline had gone by.

I saw a draft itinerary only five days before departure, and was given merely 1.5 hours to comment (!) before the USA shut down for the long holiday weekend. It was only then that I discovered that my piece on driving round lesser-known corners of Jamaica was going to amount to no more than being driven around Jamaica with the permanent company of a minder. Had I been aware of this earlier I might well not have taken the trip.

But it's just as well I did, because no sooner had I arrived then things actually clicked into action. My guide, the amiable Claudia, was not of the 'minder' kind, was not in denial about Jamaica's reputation, and indeed would have been hard put to deny some of its problems since only a few minutes after leaving the airport when we stopped so I could use a bank machine, someone immediately offered me some dope. She was justifiably horrified, not that I was in the slightest bit bothered about it, and drove the man away. This was, however, the only time anything of this kind happened to me in a week.

It's always tricky when you have to have someone with an agenda at your elbow for a week, although some countries' tourism boards, and apparently Jamaica's is one, will only operate in this way. But Claudia's agenda was principally to make sure I got the stories I wanted, and it rapidly became clear that very little of my requests had been transmitted to Jamaica at all. As a result within two days we'd abandoned the existing skeletal itinerary and Claudia was spending large parts of the day on the phone to various people rearranging and reconfirming in general thoroughly sorting things out. If, en route from A to B, I spotted a turn-off to something that looked interesting, there would follow a rapid discussion about it, and an immediate change of plan if that's what I wanted. I very quickly forgot to be peeved that I wasn't driving myself and musing privately into my dictaphone. In terms of flexibility I might just as well have been driving, and while loneliness can sometimes be a problem on these trips, Claudia was very good company.

As I saw in the second half of the trip, the way most visitors treat Jamaica it might as well be the Costa del Sol, or parts of the Mexican coastline. They fly in, are collected from the airport and taken to an all-inclusive resort where they frolic on a palm-fringed beach, eat three largely foreign meals a day and drink all they want. The only Jamaicans they speak to are those working in the resort. Some take brief tours to what are inevitably the most self-consciously made-for-tourists sights on the island (although some of these are well-done). This is my idea of hell, and I simply cannot see the point (whether in Spain, Mexico, Jamaica, or anywhere else), but of course some people just want a one- or two-week break with reliable sun, sand, sea and sometimes something else beginning with 's'.

Fine, and in terms of travel writing there's nothing easier than spending three nights in each of, say, three resorts, do little more than lying around on the same all-inclusive package for a story that practically writes itself. But it's not for me.

Instead I used the excellent Sunset Resort on the south coast's Treasure Beach as a base from which to visit assorted better- and lesser-known sites in the surrounding hills, whose originally Idaho now gone-native owner volunteered to take me off in various directions, and when I came back one day feeling slack, bullied me into taking a half-hour boat ride out to a small bar on stilts. I was very glad he did, as both the trip out on a high-speed fishing boat, and the early evening spent looking down to rays and up to the sunset was a highlight.

Other high points included various roadside food stops, for jerk chicken, jerk fish, and goat curry; a day spent watching a local limited-overs cricket match (with a lively crowd of about forty), and Greenwood Great House, which I'm hoping may trigger a return to Jamaica for further work. Having seen two of the surviving great houses I'd certainly like to do something on them.

Due to someone's inability to notice that May has 31 days, it was discovered (including by me) partway through the trip, that there was a day with nothing scheduled. I was at the Hilton-run Rose Hall Resort and Spa and so ended up with a day of doing precisely what most other visitors to Jamaica do: absolutely nothing.

I rediscovered that I am now absolutely incapable of this. I put my trunks on, went and got towel, headed down to a less popular end of the beach, went for a three-minute swim, sat under a palm, and in under 15-minutes all-in was back in my room, sorting out some of my notes, doing admin email, etc. The hotel room was large, well-furnished, solid and pleasant, and lacked the self-consciously tropical motifs of others I saw (Jakes, Negril Escape). The tropics were easily visible from the balcony: white sand, turquoise water, and all

It seems to me that you can't lose with Jamaica. If it's beach time you want, there are plenty of beaches to choose from. If you want culture and history there's plenty of that, too. Possibly the ideal combination is a beach resort used as a base from which to reach the rum factories (e.g. Appleton), river trips, waterfalls, great houses, local seafood restaurants (esp. Little Ochie), small non-touristy towns with no pestering vendors, and local nightlife.

One of the most likable aspects of the country was being able, despite having a dramatically contrasting skin tone, simply to blend into the crowd, something that despite the relative lack of contrast in China, is practically impossible to achieve there. A more easygoing people more interested in simply exchanging views and making you feel comfortable you couldn't hope to meet.

Ah well. Enough rambling. I've a deadline, as usual.

To return to the title of this entry, although I did like Jamaica it really wouldn't matter if I didn't. That's not the point of this kind of travel, which is to come home with the material needed for the stories in question. Fortunately, I did that, too.

Better to arrive than to travel

2009-05-27T20:30:00.003-07:00

So if you're boarding an overnight flight of four or five hours, landing at a time your body considers to be 3am in order to wait four hours for another four-hour flight, what would you do?

Sleep? Watch VOD? Catch up with some reading?

I worked for most of the first flight and for a further two hours after landing, frantically revising a piece delayed by domestic difficulties and now overdue. Having filed it from the business lounge in Toronto, and then having found myself upgraded to business class, I thought on the flight south to Montego Bay (Jamaica for the geographically unlettered) I'd be able to sleep the sleep of if not the just, at least of the man who met his modified deadline by the skin of his teeth.

So, needless to say, no sooner had I nodded off than the Air Canada flight attendant woke me up to find out what I wanted for breakfast.

I'm hoping a rum punch with dinner and the sound of the surf outside the window will allow me my first extended sleep for more than a week, thus enabling me to be coherent when I interview an organic farmer early tomorrow morning.

Two weeks on the couch with no deadlines. That's what, ten years on, I still want.

What is 'real travel'?

2009-05-22T15:18:00.007-07:00

In comment on a post in April last year (yes, it's taken me a while to get around to this), Lara Dunston wrote:

> I'm glad your press trip went well, but I'm still not persuaded to venture on one myself, I'm afraid. I just can't see how they come close to anything like real travel.

This rather begs the question, 'What is "real travel"?' It also assumes that whatever 'real travel' may be, that's the kind of travel I'm trying to have, which might turn out to be precisely the kind of confusion between work and play this blog (such as it is) is partly dedicated to dispelling.

The phrase 'real travel' is mostly heard in the dormitories of backpackerdom, meant to differentiate between travellers ('real') and tourists (in some sense 'fake'). The idea is never thought through, but is intended to indicate that uncritically following the routes and recommendations of your Lonely Planet guide is somehow superior to being spoon-fed your information on an organised tour. In fact there's little to differentiate the two.

Here a press trip (or 'fam trip' as it's often called) is being contrasted with other travel (whether independent or fully escorted isn't clear, but it's a fairly safe bet that independent travel is going to be regarded here as the only 'real' travel).

But all travel is 'real' (or none of it is), and no one who prefers to be carted from A to B need feel obliged to work out how to do it by themselves and by public bus. No one who simply wants to be on a beach need feel obliged to steep themselves in local culture and no one who thinks that following guide book recommendations for a few days amounts to meaningful cultural immersion is to be taken seriously anyway. Indeed, it's almost impossible for something to appear in any popular guide book and still be authentic. That's one of those principles of tourism that might have been constructed by Heisenberg: the more widely something is known about the less likely it is to be original and authentic. This is Neville-Hadley's Quantum Theory of Travel.

But of course, my travel is anyway business travel, undertaken for the purpose of obtaining stories agreeable to editors, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own travel preferences. A successful trip is one in which I come back with the material I need: observations, notes on experiences, interview recordings. I may not have seen globally famous 'must-sees' despite being within five minutes of them (and I speak as one who has twice been to Alice Springs without visiting Australia's most iconic Rock--it wasn't part of the story in either case). My itinerary is agreed in advance, and even when it involves driving myself, rarely has any flexibility. But it's shaped to the needs of the stories. It's not a holiday.

In general I restrict myself to travel that can be undertaken by anyone else, and write in order to describe the experience and explain how it can be done by those who follow. This sometimes means doing more rather then less than other visitors would do, in order to be able to make a selection of experiences to recommend. One benefit of press trips with groups of journalists, although I mostly avoid these, is that there's often access provided that the average traveller wouldn't get, but which when recounted is helpful to the reader. On the excellent trip to Scottsdale that spurred the original comment, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk directly to some of the architects and their followers in a way not available to the average visitor. The point was, of course, to get information, anecdotes, and quotable material that would enliven the story and explain the experience in the words of those best qualified to comment. If this was 'unreality' then more of it is needed.

There is almost no genuinely critical travel writing for newspapers or magazines or television. This is not what the editorial and production powers feel the readers/viewers want, and the material created for these publications and broadcasts is almost universally artificial in one way or another. But the general public idea of travel is of something so imbued with glamour, whether it's the 'heroism' of hard-seat train travel in China, or the wannabe-James Bond-ness of luxury Caribbean resorts, that even someone as weary of travel as I am (and so far I've managed to avoid a trip further than Fife in Scotland this year) would have a hard time breaking the spell even if permitted by editors to do so. Indeed, it's often noticeable on website travel discussions that the unsatisfactory nature of an experience is the very last thing that either those who haven't yet travelled want to hear about, or that those who may already have travelled want to admit to. They slave and save, look forward all year to what may be the 'trip of a lifetime', and nothing is going to make them admit afterwards, that in swallowing all the clichés about a destination they were involved in duping themselves.

The best thing I can do is to avoid contributing to the overall propaganda, and if there's any distinction to be made between 'real' and 'unreal' in this context then it's to do with writing about, for instance, the insect markets in Beijing, rather than the usual goo about 'ooh-ahh Forbidden City 5000 years of culture Confucius he say'. This, however, requires a considerable amount of study and effort when venturing out of English-language territory, and is best based at least on repeated visits to the same destination. It's a lot easier just to rattle off a brainless piece on first impressions of the top sites, and it's a lot easier to publish such a piece, too.

I'm off to Jamaica next week on a trip that so far has been very poorly handled, insofar as it's taken about two months to set up with final agreement achieved, after long lacunae and one missed deadline, less than a week before departure, and with an absolutely skeletal draft itinerary which appears to have me chauffered everywhere rather than driving myself. However, the trip does seem designed to help me get the three stories I finally proposed (the intermediate PR people in New York having contributed absolutely nothing--sometimes you really do wonder what these people do to earn their money) and I'm promised that everything will stop and start at my pleasure.

The excuse (from the New York PR people) that I can't drive myself because I might get lost seems particularly absurd, not least since the tourism authorities themselves are promoting self-drive to less-visited places, which is one of the topics I'm supposed to be covering. Seeing whether this is in fact practical, and actually getting lost, is potentially part of the story.

But some tourism authorities insist on having someone at your elbow for the whole visit (and there are certainly journalists who can't survive without this, too), but it can be claustrophobic, especially to someone who prefers to use a dictaphone for notes. With the right chauffeur/guide it can be very helpful (as I remember with one in Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, one in Tokyo, and another in Asti), and in others the opposite (one in Fiji, one in Vilnius). If the timing of all this, leaving me with little option but to go to Jamaica, had been different there would have been further discussion on all this.

Regardless, the purpose of the itinerary is to get the stories. Is this artificial, in the sense that no casual traveller would adopt the same itinerary? Yes. Is it 'real'? Certainly. Getting the stories is the only thing that counts. This is work, not play.

Business as usual

2009-05-11T08:29:00.006-07:00

There's an item on the BBC World Service this morning about how the contraction of economies globally is bringing about a rise in fraud, and this is apparently a particular growing problem in Japan, where the sums involved also tend to be large.

An expert being interviewed for the programme pinpointed three particular problems that increase the chances of money invested there going astray: that foreign investors don't understand the business culture, don't understand the language, and rely very heavily on local advisors.

Now where does that sound like?

It's a constant puzzle why in so many different ways China is treated differently from anywhere else. When talking about business in China, despite endless examples of investors leaving large sums in China and achieving either a great deal less than they might have achieved elsewhere or indeed nothing at all, and despite endless cases of breach of contract, fraud, and intellectual property theft, China doesn't get a mention here.

Maybe there's no 'growth in fraud' story to tell about China because fraud reached maximum levels a long time ago.

The interviewee went on to cite an example of foreigners allowing themselves to be intimidated by local culture, or persuaded that they shouldn't ask various questions for fear of giving cultural offence. In his example an important businessman went to Japan to check on his business, was introduced in English, but then the rest of the meeting was held in Japanese. He was asked at the end if he had any questions, but was too embarrassed to ask for the matters to be gone over again in a language he understood.

Businessmen looking to invest in China are this stupid on a daily basis, and arrive already persuaded that things must be done 'the Chinese way', often by foreign consultants with every interest in promoting the obscurity of business dealings there and the inscrutability of officialdom in order to line their own pockets with fees for steering the hapless foreign investor through it all.

The advice given in the interview was that as soon as it is suggested in Japan that you should not ask a question because of local peculiarities then alarm bells should ring. In China you should not only look a gift horse in the mouth, but you should be getting its teeth X-rayed on a daily basis in order to ensure they haven't been pulled and replaced with fakes.

The way in which China is treated differently from the rest of the world never comes out more clearly than when U.S. foreign policy is considered, not only with Clinton's recent disgusting downgrading of the importance of human rights there, a demoralising self-given black eye for the new administration, but also with recent discussions of U.S. policy towards Cuba.

Shortly after her appointment to the Obama administration, Clinton made a rousing speech about telling dictators their time was up, and there would be an end to suppression of free speech, right of assembly, of religion, etc., and put several countries on notice.

Did she mention the most extravagant offender of all? No, she did not, and made it clear before visiting China that such considerations were to get less prominence than was at least claimed for them even by the Bush administration.

While apparently embargoes are appropriate for bloody-handed regimes the U.S. government doesn't like, engagement is right for others, if they have sufficient economic clout. The rhetoric on being 'leader of the free world' and on being morally upright defenders of democracy and free speech has by now added staleness to its already rank odour.

But recently to hear a Republican official criticise Obama's possible engagement with Cuba while encouraging such engagement for China was enough almost to have me hurl my laptop across the room.

What has the European policy of engagement with Cuba achieved, he asked? Has it brought about democracy or a free press?

Well has the US's engagement with China brought those institutions there?

One reason why I rarely have time to write here...

2009-03-11T15:15:00.003-07:00

Link is to Wall Street Journal article of mine on the repeated foolishness of campaigns surrounding the bronze heads from Beijing's Summer Palace.

Gross stupidity

2008-08-18T21:16:00.004-07:00

I don't have time to dismantle yet another piece of drivel by Nicholas D. Kristof, but why the New York Times continues to publish his fatuous comments on China is beyond me. Kristof is a clown, but a dangerous one because what he says is published in a newspaper of some stature, whereas he should be working for CNN.

Luckily some other readers get stuck into him here:

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/your-comments-on-my-china-column/#comments

Travelling can actually be fun

2008-08-13T17:28:00.004-07:00

I have to admit to having had something of a holiday. Not the much-desired two weeks on the couch with no deadlines (and no children), but two weeks driving around Bulgaria and Romania, both new to me, without having promised anyone I'd write anything.

I did barely any reading about Bulgaria before I boarded the plane. I had no route, no plan, and nothing booked except a rental car. We simply made it all up as we went along, stopped where we liked, had a look at two or three hotels or guesthouses before choosing one, and stayed an extra day in places we found we were enjoying. We drank large quantities of Bulgarian wine and Romanian beer, visited marvellous monasteries and churches, ventured as much into the countryside as possible, and ignored any 'must sees' we didn't feel like seeing.

It was wonderful. I could almost start to like travelling again.

I will in fact write two stories, but only because they are subjects I came across that appealed to me.

Paperwork

2008-05-06T10:59:00.004-07:00

There's recently been coverage, especially in the UK, of the one year anniversary of the disappearance of a little girl from a Portuguese sea-side resort, kidnapped as her parents dined with friends in line of sight of the room where she was sleeping with two siblings.

At the time the quiet village where the event took place was descended upon by hordes of reporters and camera crews from all over Europe. The girl has never been recovered, and few (except, at least in public, the parents) expect she ever will be.

Journalists have been back to the site with nothing new to say, and so have covered merely the effect on the village one year on, and accounts of what it was like suddenly to be under so much scrutiny for several months.

One expat (if I remember this correctly) running a pub, remarked that the worst thing about having so many journalists around was that they all wanted receipts for everything.

This was bound to make someone who had just been assembling his papers for his accountant so that the annual tax return could be compiled smile rather wryly. The staff journalists and stringers wanted the receipts to claim expenses from their employers. But for freelances proper retention of receipts can make the difference between an unprofitable and a profitable year in this business, and keeping and filing them form part of the great accounting exercise that travel writing represents.

Great mountains of mouldering paper, carefully sorted and annotated, go to the accountant each year. He's used to getting full-form and simplified Chinese characters (and occasionally pulls out receipts at random to ask me what they are and to test that I'm not attempting to mislead either him or the tax authorities. This year he had to deal with Arabic, too, and two currencies sufficiently obscure for the authorities not to provide official average exchange rates: those for the Jordanian and Libyan dinar.

191 nights were spent overseas last year (in Hong Kong, Macau, China, Libya, the UK, Jordan, the USA, and various corners of Canada) a figure I hope significantly to reduce this year, but with still no prospect of two weeks on the couch. Australia and Arizona already...

Some things go well

2008-04-26T12:28:00.005-07:00

I generally shy away from organised group press trips, but I've just returned from one to Scottsdale in Arizona that I'm rather glad I didn't refuse. It wasn't too large (although the largest they've done, apparently), the other writers were all real (this is by no means always the case), the people running the trip were very pleasant without being artificial about it, and the arrangements made delivered the story promised very effectively, which is far and away the most important thing.

I managed to slice one day off the trip, and one spa visit, although I couldn't avoid another. I must admit, though, that my face has responded well to being smeared with an entire dessert trolley's worth of fruity and chocolaty substances and is softer than a baby's bottom. Since I regularly have to get close up to a baby's bottom these days I'm in a position to make this rather predictable comparison.

Perhaps one thing that made this trip not just successful but enjoyable was that I had low expectations. It's a commonplace in North America for destinations to be over-promoted, and to be pretty thin on real attractions especially if the emphasis is historical, at least to a snotty European. But in this case, in addition to the tiny, slightly Disneyfied Wild West old part of Scottsdale, there was mid-20th century history well worth a look, particularly in the form of the oddly-named Hotel Valley Ho, a late-50s masterpiece recently renovated and partly rebuilt not with its rooms an exact copy of the period, but rather in homage to it, right down to a Viewmaster next to the bed. (It's impossible that such a device would be named today without an intercap.) The colour scheme contained hues I can seriously say haven't been seen since the 60s, and I fully expected a Dr. No-era Sean Connery to step out of the shower in nothing but a towel at any moment. It was truly enjoyable in a way most hotels aren't.

The other mid-century masterpiece was Frank Lloyd Wright's winter base, originally set up miles from anywhere, and now swallowed by Scottsdale's sprawl. Taliesin West was where Wright trained his apprentices in slave-like conditions, making them not only design shelters for their accommodation way out in the desert, but build them by hand, having first raised the funds themselves. In between this they built the combined studio and residence building, constantly tearing down and re-erecting sections on Wright's whim. Scottsdale is still home to many who studied with Wright in this way, none of them now young, and part of the purpose of the trip was to take a tour of the remarkable buildings in the company of one of them, and to talk to some others. This was something of a privilege, not least since all were remarkably quotable and founts of good stories about Wright the man, while in some cases displaying the kind of idolatry more usually connected with cults, especially those still living on the vast desert property in buildings that were largely invisible. This, Hotel Valley Ho, the anti-suburban planning ideas of the 88-year-old Soleri (another ex-Wright pupil), and some other unexpectedly excellent art-related experiences in Scottsdale form the core of a story that I'm actually looking forward to writing.

And its hard to dislike a place with relentlessly predictable sunny weather (Wimbledon should be rescheduled for spring and moved here), palm trees, and giant cactuses with real personalities.

Best of all, it only took four days to do. I'll take more fam trips like that, thank you.

All his own work

2008-04-15T20:12:00.006-07:00

I'm in a great hurry and shouldn't be doing this at all, but two events that would normally be fodder for this blog have taken place without comment appearing here: firstly the Tibetan riot/Olympic torch/poor reporting/reaction to same, and secondly a case of self-outed laziness and plagiarism by a guide book writer. I'm choosing here the more trivial topic for comment (indeed amongst the most trivial topics of which one could conceive) partly because the more important one has grown too large to deal with in fewer than several thousand words, and partly because much of the comment that has already appeared on the plagiarism question is so profoundly ill-informed it makes me want to gnash my teeth.

It's also appropriate to write on guide book plagiarism when I don't have time when the reason I don't have time is that I'm working on two guide books.

I believe the story may have begun with an interview given to the Melbourne Herald Sun by ex-Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm. His purpose, apparently, was to gain advance publicity for an account of his misadventures working on various South American titles for LP, and tasters given included providing a good review to a restaurant following sex with a waitress, claims to have dealt drugs in order to supplement meagre fees from LP, failing even to visit one country he was paid to write about, and plagiarising or simply making up other information because LP wasn't paying enough. These, at least, were claims in the original story and in versions that appeared shortly afterwards in other media world-wide doing little more than rehash the original with comments from leaked LP internal memos, and later a public response from LP. There followed, inevitably, a lot of braying on the blogs of travellers (never 'tourists') and wannabe travel writers.

A very great deal of all this is utter humbug.

Firstly, there's nothing new under the sun, and most of all not in what passes for journalism today. This is far from the first time that an LP writer has been accused of plagiarism (although it may be the first time one has stood self-accused). Thinking only of my particular special interest, China, I seem to remember there was an issue involving one of the co-authors of the original LP China. Much of LP Beijing a few editions ago was clearly lifted and paraphrased by the author from an expat-produced (and now defunct) guide called The Beijing Guidebook, and I published an article about that at the time. I also recall one edition of LP's Pakistan guide about which many readers asserted the writer could not possibly have taken the trips since his descriptions were so wide of the mark. And in the 'nothing new' department it's also worth mentioning that it's only a few years since the last quick flash of articles about the world of the 'Shock! Horror! Probe! Guide book writers are so badly paid they don't do the work properly!' variety. People have very short memories.

Nor, of course, is Lonely Planet the only victim (although it has only itself to blame). As another guide book editor I know says, the first thing he does when he receives a submission is to start Googling sections of it. And it's not uncommon to find material simply pasted from web pages straight into submitted text. I know of three occasions on which my own work has been plagiarised, and in two cases I've found myself editing text clearly lifted from my own books. As I said to the company in question, as least I'm getting some income out of it as I'm being paid to edit it.

But no one surely needs to read an article about poor guide book research to suddenly discover Lonely Planet titles are fifth-rate. The statements by published media and bloggers alike that Lonely Planet's reputation is suddenly under threat had my jaw hitting the keyboard.

What reputation?

It's been a few years since I looked at a Lonely Planet guide but that's because of their obvious ignorance, cluelessness, and scant literacy. In the China titles there were not only howlers galore but self-confessed borrowing in the form of words of thanks to Fred or Joan who'd travelled the southern Taklamakan route, for instance, and whose notes the author had then used.

I've been told that Lonely Planet recruits a pool of writers (and you have in many cases to use the term 'writer' very loosely indeed) who then get assigned to various guides, rather than choosing specialists. Be that as it may, the mini-biographies of the contributors often go out of their way to stress the writer's complete lack of relevant experience. The biographies are the first place you should look when considering the purchase of a guide, especially for somewhere as complex and different as China. Reading those of many Lonely Planet contributors in the past it seemed the only quality required was that of being able to don a back-pack without falling over. From the text it was obvious that writing skills were not required, and since there was almost always no previous experience of China mentioned and no familiarity with the language, there was absolutely no chance right from the start that a work of any usefulness or intelligence would be produced even in the basic history and culture sections let alone hard research. Time after time LP books make only the vaguest gestures at useful directions or transport information. Time after time they say there's no public transport when there is. Time after time it's plain from the text that hearsay is being used. I once used to know one of the LP China authors who told me quite frankly that if he found he'd forgotten a phone number he'd just make it up. There wasn't time to go back and they weren't paying him enough to bother. And in effect, since he had not a word of Mandarin, he couldn't have used the telephone or printed references to find out even if he could have been bothered.

LP China, in addition to the edifying observation in its first edition that Chinese women must have the smallest breasts in the world, managed to go six editions with its history section stating that the Mongol Yuan dynasty was the only period when China was ruled by foreigners. What's more staggering: that the original writer could be so ignorant or that this could pass through the hands of six sets of editors (or the same editor six times) and still not be picked up?

The answer, to those of us who know the guide book industry, is that neither is terribly surprising at all. But Lonely Planet's reputation is only now in danger? Really? Has no one been paying any attention at all?

The single most important talent needed at a guide book company is the ability to select the right writer for the job. Only one or two I've ever spoken to (and I've worked for five of them, one of those under three different owners, and had discussions with three others) had the faintest idea of that. Very commonly once the decision is made to produce a title there's a scramble to find an author or authors in a very short space of time, and authors are hired on the most casual acquaintance and without any writing tests being undertaken or other hoops being jumped through. That something like this may have happened at Lonely Planet was acknowledged in a leaked internal memo from another LP author, quoted in several stories:

'"Why did you (management) not understand that when you hire a constant stream of new, unvetted people, pay them poorly and set them loose, that someone, somehow was going to screw you?" author Jeanne Oliver wrote.'

Many travel publishing companies are just factories, and if a writer is willing to get started right now, and do it for the pitiful sum on offer, then off they go. The main thing is to get the book done on time and get it on the shelves to start capitalising on an established brand name and make its production costs back. Accuracy is of no particular concern, and not even the most minimal fact-checking takes place. Note that Lonely Planet now claims to be fact-checking Kohnstamm's work in print. Isn't that a little late? The company has been claiming that Kohnstamm's methods are rare in guide book writing, but given the lack of any serious editing or fact-checking it's hardly in a position to know, is it? And implicit in this statement is a denial of earlier cases of the same thing, and the fact that taking short cuts is overtly acknowledged in some titles, and completely clear from the text of others.

Authors who insist on going over edits and checking maps become regarded as difficult, as happened to me at Frommer's, for instance. But then in most cases authors just sling crudely marked-up maps at editors and are happy not to look at them or anything else again. The editor is left to decipher everything, and it's no wonder that guide book maps tend to be so poor as a result. Both sides are to blame here.

I happen to think LP guides (unless they've improved very recently) are particularly poor, not least due to an almost anti-intellectual stance. But every series is in the situation described above: 'pay them poorly, set them loose' and of the five I've worked for only one pays a royalty--helping to keep the writer interested in the quality and sales of the title, and letting him retain the copyright. The rest pay flat fees for all rights for all media for all time and you're lucky if there's any author recognition at all. The quicker the work is done, the more of the fee you get to keep. The more diligent you are, the more you spend, and the less profit you make.

And that--diligence--is the quality guide book companies need to identify. As I've written here before, when I recruited writers to work on the first edition of Frommer's China, I looked for people who spoke the language, who had had periods of residence in China, and who seemed neither in love with the country nor hating it (both common), but engaged with it while being sceptical of it. If an author has had no residence in a country, and does not have at least a modest acquaintance with the local language, there is no chance of a realistic and well-informed portrayal of that country.

An attempt to gauge diligence was undertaken through long interviews and writing tests. The aim was to find people who cared desperately that what was going to appear under their names was accurate, and who understood how little information in China can be taken at face value. I think in three out of four cases I succeeded.

No previous experience with guide books was required--in fact it was regarded as a disadvantage. An ability to write came much further down the list. Naturally the ability to construct properly grammatical sentences was regarded as a minimum (it clearly isn't at Lonely Planet) but the ability to write in a bright and fresh manner was regarded as less important. For those who got the facts right the prose could always be polished a bit. Most guide book formats do not provide space for extended prose. As it was the problem turned out to be the technical one of writing in a sufficiently compressed style, and I had to spend a lot of time on editing it down. But bright, fresh, and often amusing, it turned out to be.

And I think several of the writers spent every penny of their fees on getting the research done. Then held down jobs or undertook other writing assignments to keep themselves fed while they composed the text. No cutting of corners here; no hearsay; just hard work. And there are other guide book authors like them.

But there are plenty more like Kronstamm, if simply lazy and ignorant rather than quite as self-professedly extravagant in their abuse. As I've edited others' contributions to several guide books I've often come across it. The author of the first editions of Frommer's Beijing and Shanghai guides had managed to spend some time in China and yet remain profoundly ignorant even of basic social courtesies and simple street names. The author of the Frommer's Hong Kong guide seemed to me to have only the most distant acquaintance with the destination when I was forced to look over some of her work, some really fundamental navigational information basic to getting round the territory being either wrong or missing altogether (not to mention the provision of tedious prose, bizarre observations such as dismissing a street for being full of Chinese shops, and the most uninspired and ill-informed selection of restaurants I've ever seen in a guide).

So shock and horror at the idea that LP guides might not be all that well researched is hogwash, as is Lonely Planet's position of fainting like a too tightly laced-up Victorian nanny at the mere suggestion. Many another series is just the same, and in the end it's the choice of author that matters, not the choice of brand (except insofar as certain kinds of information are needed--budget travel or cultural, for instance).

What else comes out of all this hoo-hah?

The absurd suggestion that LP writers don't accept free trips, and the equally absurd suggestion that to accept a free trip is to be corrupt. The copy in the front of every LP guide says that writers do not give good reviews in return for free access, not that they don't accept free access at all. If that little loophole wasn't left open it's hard to see how anything could be done at all, although it's also obvious from the text that LP writers do not eat in the best restaurants or stay at the best hotels being thereby forced to fudge their reviews, although this isn't difficult since those reviews are so brief anyway.

Larger guide book series appealing to deeper-pocketed readers rely on their reputations making sure that the writers get as much free travel, accommodation, entry, and meals as possible, and provide a letter for the writer to brandish. In Western Europe and North America this will go a very long way, and needs to, because it simply isn't financially viable to do it any other way. And there's nothing wrong with that so long as the writer doesn't allow himself to be bought. What's more of a challenge to honesty is the determination of some series (not LP in this case) to be relentlessly sunny, to the point where editors, who typically interfere in little else, will rewrite reviews to be more cheerful, or delete critical matter.

Guide books are in general as shoddy as they are not only because the wrong people are recruited and then paid too little, but because of various structural policies, that include:

Investing just about viable sums in producing the first issue of a guide, but then tiny sums in its updating

In some cases expecting only closed restaurants and hotels to be replaced, leading to ridiculously out-of-date selections in subsequent editions for fast-changing destinations such as China

In some cases being happy for the updating simply to be done from the desk, and only paying enough for that

Insisting on having every book for every destination work to the same formula with text being dropped in to a template, leading to silly distortions (since countries vary widely). This is partly done through ignorance of other cultures, and partly because using the template means the author is doing layout work and saving costs at the design end

Refusing to deal with non-Roman scripts because it's just too much bother although guide books to some countries are quite simply useless without them

Employing editors and sub-editors who are barely literate themselves (rare, but it happens), and rarely employing anyone who has been to China (for instance) on a guided tour, let alone having any deeper knowledge of the country.

So for heaven's sake, guide book readers: know from the start that what you're buying is more likely than not to be lazily put together and full of errors, and written by someone largely ignorant of their subject, with later errors added by equally ignorant editors. Look for biographical evidence of familiarity with the subject and long experience of it (but not too close--guide books written by people operating tour companies at the destination, as one Bradt guide I'm currently looking at, ought to be read with caution). Writers who've contributed to books on the Caribbean, Lesotho, the USA, and Cambodia should simply be avoided. Look over the text for signs of keen eyesight and sharp wits, and choose books with longer descriptions that force the writer to be expressive and informative--ignorance will tend to show up. Otherwise treat the writer as you would a film critic, and be prepared to learn over time whether you agree with his or her opinions. Learn principles of approach from your first encounters with your destination, and apply those when looking for accommodation rather than always picking from the list of choices given. It's just a guide.

The writers and wannabes currently screaming that the Kohnstamm revelations (good title for a spy thriller, although the comments attributed to him are about as revelatory as news that there's toast and coffee for breakfast) are damaging the reputation of travel writers in general should reflect that they have no reputations to lose, either. It's like becoming an estate agent, car mechanic, or lawyer: you may be as honest as can be, but you have to live with the fact that the reputation of your profession is not an attractive one.

Kohnstamm has turned out to be an unreliable source in every way. In more recent interviews he is back-pedalling, claiming he didn't invent or plagiarise after all.

Now that's a claim I really do find incredible.

Written in haste. For more on the vicissitudes of writing guides see this post:

Frommer's China

and this one Writing China guides.

Now to bed in the knowledge I'll have much catching up to do tomorrow.

Sinking feeling

2007-11-23T20:38:00.000-08:00

Sometime earlier today the MS Explorer sank just off the Antarctic Peninsula. A quick click on the posts for February 2005 will show that I sailed to that very area in the same ship two years ago, and I found the news pictures of the vessel lying on its side haunting and mournful.

The Explorer was a ship with a history. It was functional and cosy, and it took me on one of the most memorable trips of my life, but even I'm surprised at how saddening I find the thought of its loss. All the passengers and crew were saved after only a short time in lifeboats and Zodiacs, and the ship itself was only a hunk of metal after all.

I interviewed the owner Bruce Poon Tip while I was on the cruise. He was fretting a little about the cost of the ship's recent refit, and only half-jokingly asking people to take care of his brand new carpets. I wonder what he's thinking now.

After another full day as a filing clerk, moving data from voice recording to database, I'm off for a quick drink with a group of friends and acquaintances known as the Idle Journalists. But I'm going to raise a glass to the Explorer.

Back from Beijing

2007-10-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

In front of me a new computer--a giant 24-inch iMac with vast amounts of RAM, hard drive, and very rapid twin processors. To its right a brand new 500GB external hard drive to which the machine is set to back-up automatically every day.

And this is just as well because no sooner did I have this set up and two months' work copied across from my laptop then the track pad on the laptop suddenly stopped working. With only a month to start delivering sections of the entirely revised edition of 'Beijing', this would be a bit of a disaster. As it is, I'll hand the laptop in next time I'm passing, and won't be in any particular hurry to get it back.

Also in front of me: a GPS with an assortment of data, a mobile phone with a Beijing SIM card and a collection of important phone numbers, and a Palm device running the splendid PlecoDict software enabling me to write characters and swiftly check pronunciation and tone where necessarily.

Just behind these stands a stack of rail, air, and bus timetables, and Beijing maps and street atlases for cross-checking against each other, and a very well-thumbed copy of the previous edition, many of them heavily marked with notes of various varieties. No two maps of Beijing can be relied upon to agree, and none of them are accurate.

On the floor to my left sits a large suitcase full of press releases, brochures, business cards, tickets, menu notes, and receipts, and in case, just slightly more than one jet-lagged week after returning, I've forgotten Beijing, when I open the case that inimitable smell rises to catch the back of the throat. Unnoticeable when in the city perhaps because one swiftly becomes inured, this mix of dirt, pollution, and print will hang permanently about until I throw the paperwork out.

The job now, other than listening to and transcribing many hours of voice notes now stored on the hard drive, is to take each scrap of paper, copy English and Chinese notes from it, and transfer it to a box on the other side of me when complete.

If this sounds less than glamorous, it is. Nevertheless, I'm actually looking forward to it rather more than I do to writing articles. Luckily the Cadogan format requires entertaining prose and provides plenty of space for it, so that the books in the series are often genuinely worth reading in their own right, and often very funny. But in the end the point is to provide a useful tool for the visitor to China, and the addresses, telephone numbers, prices, and so on contained in the already mouldering pile of papers to my left are the essential skeleton on which the flesh of the prose will be hung. The few who do guide books well care very much about getting these details right, and there's much pleasure to be had from having put in the effort to winkle out the truth of how various kinds of arrangements can be made, just how much really should be paid, and now seeing it go into print as sound advice for those who care to use it. (Some don't, and I'll write about that on another occasion.)

Having spent almost all day almost every day on my feet for the last two months (no weekends off in this job), it's also a pleasure to look at the pile of paper as the physical record of work done, and to feel the fruits of that labour in the transference of notes to hard drive, and eventually into readable text.

So for the next couple of months I'll be sitting opposite this screen, trying hard to adopt a position of which my physiotherapist would approve (and whose remonstrations partly drove the purchase of new equipment) and transferring facts, item by item, from paper to database.

I'm going nowhere. Except possibly New Zealand.

Where am I?

2007-08-28T16:04:00.001-07:00

How to occupy yourself on a 14.5-hour flight to Beijing?

Finish writing a story on Libya, of course. Time flies nearly as fast as the plane does.

When you arrive deal with queries about one on Montreal, edit another on the Dead Sea, and deal with planning for a visit to Australia in April.

Eventually you'll notice you're in Beijing and remember what you're here for.

It's going to be a painful 12 months' wait for the Olympics

2007-08-11T13:03:00.000-07:00

I don't usually put Oriental-List (see link at side) postings here, but this was a response to the forwarding a blog entries by an Australian journalist at the link above,entry for August 7:

>I was expecting lots of people, but nothing prepared me for the endless streets of large tower blocks and huge skyscrapers.

Amongst many things that might have prepared the author of this piece for 'endless streets of large tower blocks and huge skyscrapers' would have been all the many articles published in recent times by other journalists flown in to Beijing or Shanghai for five minutes and that also begin with the same gormless observation: 'Wow! They've got tall buildings in China!'

You only have to think back to earlier this year (or late last?) when the BBC decided to have most of its programmes for a week come from China. It might also be noted that there have been large numbers of articles recently about multi-billion yuan projects by various "starchitects", of which Rem Koolhaas' striking CCTV building is only one (see Herzog and de Meuron's National Stadium, and PTW's National Aquatics Centre, Paul Adreu's National Theatre, etc. Although admittedly these aren't exactly towers they are amongst the most striking, expensive, large-scale and avant-garde pieces of architecture anywhere on the planet, and not exactly well-kept secrets.)

This is a foretaste of what we can expect during the Olympics when sport commentators may well be expected to file other material on China, or fill in longeurs with observations full of the blandest and most inaccurate generalities.

A few years ago, when some U.S. president or other was on a state visit to China there was a competition on the list as to who would be the first to hear a commentator say that the Great Wall could be seen from space. There was no shortage of entries. Perhaps during the Olympics we should have another, with a prize for whoever spots the first observation that Beijing has tall buildings, and perhaps members could suggest other platitudes to listen out for.

But despite a flurry of articles in the recent past about the fact that (surprise!) the Great Wall cannot be seen from space (next: 'Spiders don't in fact come out of the bath plug hole shock!'), based on the Baldock evidence we'd probably be safe in simply repeating the competition from last time. The Great Wall's visibility at astronomical distances is bound to be asserted by some other journalist who also apparently doesn't read.

To be fair it must be said that much of the utterly limp reporting on China is not due simply to the lack of talent of those parachuted in for a quick report, but due to the fact that the prevailing view amongst less well-informed editors overseas is the 'unstoppable China rising' story: that's the one they send reporters to get, and they will brook no other. Amongst all the mild hoo-hah about a recent Time report on the indifference of younger members of Beijing's miniscule middle class to matters political no one mentioned that the content of the story was certainly decided before the dinner conversation that formed much of its content actually took place. This is how much 'investigative' reporting is done even by supposedly respectable periodicals, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this list in having seen my material re-written by editors in London, New York, and even Hong Kong, to reflect their views when those are in opposition to what is actually found on the ground.

My favourite recent example of this was in the television documentary The Tank Man, shown widely in English-speaking markets in which the purpose of the documentary maker was to show that the events of Tian'an Men Square in June 1989 had been forgotten, and in particular that the authorities had been successful in suppressing all knowledge of 'the tank man'--the lone individual with his shopping bags who stood in front of a line of tanks to stop them, thus creating one of the most familiar news images of the 20th century.

In this film four hapless Bei Da (Peking University) students are handed a copy of the image and asked what it says to them. You can see this painful and embarrassing sequence here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/

It's part six, whose text summary says, 'Beida University students don't recognize the photo of the tank man...'

Unfortunately for this thesis, one of the students whispers, ''89', to which another replies, 'Haoxiang shi!' ('It seems like it') while the commentary over the top nevertheless disingenuously states that she's baffled.

Out loud the students demur: 'I really don't know; I'm just guessing,' and ask whether the photo is a piece of artwork especially put together for the interviewer's 'experiment'.

It's not just that the English commentary lies about the content of the conversation, but that the whole situation is journalistically bankrupt. Of course the four students were carefully picked by the film-maker's minders, although we're led to suppose that the crew just wandered onto the campus (of Bei Da!) and sat down a few random students in front of the camera for a chat. Nothing is said about the fact that the minder is sitting somewhere behind the camera (a point later admitted by the film-maker in an interview for a different programme, apparently without the slightest embarrassment), and what Bei Da student is going to risk piping up enthusiastically with, 'Yes, yes, I know!' in front of a vast potential foreign television audience and at the cost of failing to graduate or being kicked out altogether. Their expressed bewilderment is almost pantomimic, except that it clearly seems to say, 'How could you put us on the spot like this?'

Later the hyper-intelligent Robin Munro, co-author of the best book on the events of June 89 (Black Hands of Beijing), is perhaps fist given this false picture of proceedings as he's co-opted into regretting on film that the Bei Da students know nothing of the those events, when surely he knows better.

The commentary says that the film of the 'tank man' was only shown once on China Television, and that no one under 20 in China is likely to have seen it. Anyone who knows students at Beijing universities will know what nonsense that last part is. Or it's wild coincidence that even I know several who've seen the clip more than once on the foreign English-language channels they are allowed in their dorm rooms. A quick search of Youtube using the terms 'tank' and 'Beijing' produces four options to watch the clip on the first page of results alone. Despite blockage of Youtube in China, there is no way that this clip hasn't been downloaded many times and passed around, and it's naive in the extreme to think otherwise.

This is not to deny that there's a largely successful attempt to suppress all public discussion of those events in China, but that's a good enough point in itself without distorting the facts to suit the thesis, which is nearly as shameful. It's obviously not considered a good enough point on which to hang an entire documentary.

The actual politics here and the detailed truth of what happened in the past are beside the point. These remarks are not about politics but about the problem of getting a reliable picture of China even for trivial tourism purposes. If we can't trust the Chinese media to do anything but lie it's not clear that we can take much of our own media seriously either, not because there's a propaganda agenda in the same way (although sometimes, depending on the owner or the desire for advertising income there clearly is one of some sort or other) but simply because many of our journalists are incompetent, and others are looking to tailor information to make it fit their idea of what appeals.

Getting true and accurate information on China from Western media is actually quite tricky, and if the Olympics turn out to be a propaganda success for the Beijing government, it will be as much due to the parroting of received 'wisdom' and utter laziness on the part of journalists, and the pre-disposition for the sunny or shocking by ill-informed editors, as to its own direct efforts.

>Beijing is full of contrasts ...

Good grief! This isn't a piece of reporting, it's a postcard home. Clearly either no one edits this blog, or 'city of contrasts' has somehow been purged so often it's been re-born as some kind of acceptabe neo-cliche.

And here's an example of the Western press doing the government's job for it, of which we can expect to see a lot more over the Olympic period:

The government went on the front foot to fight corruption last week by sacking 1,500 officials from around the country for failing to fulfill their duties appropriately.

If sacking a handful of officials, which happens all the time, was all it took to have an impact on corruption then the administration would be now be as pure enough to be a candidate for beatification.). This is window-dressing and nothing more, given dignity by being repeated uncritically in Western media, no doubt to be re-translated back in to Chinese, circulated in neibu commentaries as an example of Western reporting, and possibly to be commented on in the very same media from which it originated in the first place.

And the same will likely happen with increasing frequency on the subject of Olympic preparations, and by the time hundreds of reporters are there our screens will be almost entirely full of warm fuzzy images of a joy joy luck luck happy happy China, although at least Baldock occasionally hinted at a less fluffy China. Let's hope there's still room for the voices of some of the resident journalists with a few years in place and decent Mandarin who can sneak successfully around reporting restrictions and whose commentary may get beyond mentioning problems with the smog.

Speaking of which, are those million cars (four million according to Baldock) off the road yet? Can anyone tell? Has the haze cleared enough to reveal the (shock!) tall buildings?

Spaaaaaaargh!

2007-04-26T08:24:00.000-07:00

Last week, somewhere on the Jordan side of the Dead Sea, I was shut into a small room with a lithe Czech, who proceeded to smother me in an abrasive salty substance, and once I'd been allowed to wash that off to then smother me in thick black mud, wrap me up in a layer of polythene and a heated blanket, and leave me mummified for 15 minutes.

It's now a commonplace of travel that every up-market hotel will have a spa, wherever that hotel may be. And spas, almost universally, consist of dimly-lit rooms with pseudo-ethnic art on the walls, candles burning, and the most dimwitted of New Age music playing on an eternal loop. At the Dead Sea there's a very long history of touting the medicinal qualities of the soupy lake's mineral-rich waters, and people can be found on its shores, at least at the sections owned by the luxury hotels, covering themselves in black, gelatinous matter they dig up themselves.

But all over the world now spas and spa history are being invented, and the merits of rubbing whatever is locally available into your skin being touted. Hotels find in spas a profitable new income stream, keeping guests inside the building spending money.

I loathe spas, in a cordial sort of way, so it doesn't surprise me terribly much that work seems constantly to take me to them. I've had an Indonesian 'therapy' in Whistler BC (complete with gamelan), and had a Thai squeeze the stuffing out of every extremity in Macau (and although I dislike massages, I have to admit that she really was very good). I like immersing myself in hot water in places that have a true history of doing so, and where it also performs a social function, such as in Japan and Iceland. But being inside some windowless box and smeared with essence of bat fart to assorted bonging noises seems to me the height of farce, and to call this a kind of luxury is the height of delusion. When I hear people who plan to travel to China start to waffle on about what spas China might have (and to be sure, China will invent for you any kind of foolishness you're willing to pay for) I feel like drowning myself in a Jacuzzi. Why this obsession with making everywhere feel the same?

After 15 minutes of mummification I was unzipped and helped up to a sitting position still wrapped in the polythene and feeling like a piece of dry cleaning. After showering I felt I was a few millimetres smaller all over. I've had to do two spas so far this year, and with luck that will be it. There's only so much New Age music I can take.

Two new red bits

2007-04-26T00:29:00.000-07:00

Last month I tried to post from Tripoli, mainly for the pleasure of posting from somewhere unusual (at least unusual to me), but the Internet service at the hotel was down. These few words are posted from Petra, and those with a clue about geography will have noticed two new red splodges on the map above.

Time was when I had the desire to visit at least 100 countries before I died, but now I'd much rather know a few countries better. There are now only three trips left I really want to do, and then I think I'd be happy to stay at home with a pile of good books and a comfortable sofa on which to sit and read them. I'm becoming a more reluctant travel writer all the time.

And I've very much fallen back in love with the English countryside over the last few weeks, having spent time in Somerset, Cornwall, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Shropshire, much of it not doing any work at all, but simply pleasing myself (and friends and family). Travel without taking a single note is bliss indeed.

But I rose early this morning and by 6.30am was on my way to Petra, to walk through the Siq unaccompanied by any creature except birds, their calls amplified by the narrow chasm. Yesterday afternoon the route was a sea of tourists returning from the key sights, and walking through the winding passage by myself felt like the cultural equivalent of royalty (or Hollywood star) visiting a department store that has been temporarily closed to all other shoppers. And, of course, I took the picture that everyone is supposed to take, or my version of it at least, cack-handed with a camera as I am.

Most visitors to Petra will only spend a single night here, whereas I have the leisure of three days, and can go where and when I choose, not feeling that I'm using up precious moments of my 14 days' holiday by dithering when I've all of Egypt to fit into the same trip.

But will diligence and a sense of duty to future readers of the articles that result from this visit force me to climb the thousand steps to one Petra high point for the purpose of giving a fair account of it? Given the afternoon temperatures here it's an unattractive prospect, especially both following and preceding a 4km walk, but I think it must be done. I'll just have to think of all the (rather more serious) Chinese mountains I've climbed, of trekking in Nepal, of going up and down Hokkaido volcanoes (only last year), and hope the flab acquired during a year of mostly being at the keyboard doesn't hold me back.

Priorities

2007-02-22T17:10:00.000-08:00

Here we are in late February. Already this year I've been in Hong Kong, Macau, Beijing, and Philadelphia, the last being by far the most exotic to me. Since I last posted here I've also been in England, in Alba and Asti (Italy), somewhere near Chambery (France), and on a train over the Rockies from Vancouver to Banff. I'm about to go to England, Libya, Egypt and Jordan (on a separate trip), and possibly to Poland. Later in the year I'll go to Montreal, and an extensive provincial park outside Toronto.

This is already starting to sound like Marco Polo with his endless dull lists in The Travels.

But with conflicting deadlines for contributions to three different books, and a constant stream of article deadlines, not to mention the endless administration involved in getting this year's trips set up, where would you put your priorities? Not forgetting time spent preparing tax materials for the accountant, although at least rather limited travel last year meant fewer different scripts and languages to deal with.

And surely you must have got the idea by now? Travel writing is an exhausting and frustrating way of making a living.

Still not convinced?

Well I'll do my best to give more examples this year then.

Quandary

2006-09-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

Today, a few hours before leaving for the airport (England, Italy, France, more England) I receive a request to contribute two brief sections to some new picture book on the best trips, which is clearly planning to surf on the success of the 'things to do before you die' titles--but I'm not allowed to say any more.

What often happens with books like these is that the publishing company, which may have the highest reputations, simply gets a book packager to do them. Packagers also dream up such projects and pitch them to big publishers.

Needless to say, inserting such middlemen generally reduces payments to authors yet further, and authors generally get little or no credit in these titles anyway. The pay for these two sections amounts to little more than pocket money, and, of course they have a submission date of merely two weeks from now, when I'll be in the middle of a European trip.

Worse, although I was originally asked to choose from a list of options, which included travel in Japan, Antarctica, Canada, and Hong Kong, too, I've only been assigned two pieces in China. And of these two trips, one is the Yangzi River cruise, which I'm supposed to praise to the (heavily polluted) skies, when I'm fairly well-known, to the point of being quoted in articles published by others, for scathing criticism of the hype surrounding this trip.

Small money; short notice; asked to praise something of which I disapprove. So why get involved?

Well, it's simply the case that there are very few places indeed to write honest and frank accounts of the difficulties with a trip as opposed to its merits. Take it as read that almost all travel writing for periodicals and for gift books of these kind is worthless as a real guide to what is good and what isn't. It's written with stars in the eyes, and saccharine on the tongue (not to mention clichés and vague and often wildly inaccurate generalisations), and with little reference to reality. If I don't do this, someone else will, and there's no shortage of people who neither care about this issue, nor know anything about China, who might well be selected.

The original email I received said I'd been referred by someone whose name I didn't recognise at all. Finally I used Spotlight to do a search of my hard drive and discovered this person in a cc: field on an email from one of my publishers; apparently someone who works in the accounts department.

And this brings us to the point. References for work come from the most surprising places. The publisher whose name will end up on this book is very prestigious. Likely the book packager will have other projects, or herself be asked for recommendations for reliable writers.

Sometimes it just pays to grin and bear it, and when considering what work to take on, a whole basked of actual and potential benefits have to be considered.

Right. I'm off to the airport. Meetings with publishers in London, a couple of stories to do in northern Italy, and little wandering in France, and, I hope time to see some friends in passing.

And I'll be writing these two sections on the plane.

The Monty Python song, "We love you Yangtze/Yangtze Kiang" is playing in my head.

Welcome back

2006-07-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

Got back four days ago from nearly six weeks away, and couldn't possibly be less interested in writing, whether that's the innumerable bread-and-butter emails, the pitches to editors, the articles themselves, letters to friends, or indeed postings here.

Over six weeks in Hong Kong, China, and Japan I became more and more convinced that this way of life is both silly and immoral.

In work terms the Hong Kong trip went smoothly (thanks HKTB) despite the intervention of a hurricane which delayed me for a day. Of course I spent part of the time locked up in a hotel room completing a story on Whistler. But I tramped up hills on Po Toi, visited a new fishing museum near where I used to live, spent a day hopping on and off trains around the New Territories, reviewed some new hotels for future guide book editions, tried out The Peninsula's new spa, and saw friends for dinners.

I was glad to keep my visit to Shanghai brief and mainly administrative, to do with work on the DK Beijing and Shanghai guide, before heading up the Yangzi into China's glum interior, hopping from one decaying and polluted former treaty port to another, and scarcely sight of the sun, which couldn't break through the murk. It finally came out when I headed north from Chongqing to Chengdu, where I had a couple of pleasant dinners with an Internet acquaintance.

After an overnight at a hostel near Shanghai's Pudong Airport I flew to Tokyo.

As I've found on direct China to Japan trips before, nothing makes China look worse than the quick transit to a country that for all its problems, actually works. Perhaps it's the superficial (micron-deep) similarity between the two places and two peoples that makes the contrast so shocking. Just getting into a lift is all that's necessary. In China people often reach for the close door button first, even if someone can be seen running for the lift, and then for the button for the floor. In Japan they reach for the button to hold the door open, and then shuffle apologetically around to make room for the newcomer.

And they are the world's pre-eminent queue-ers, too (step back, you British). Whereas even at Narita, being lined up by incompetent Northwest Airlines staff a family of Shanghainese tried to graft themselves surreptitiously onto a line stretching for many metres behind them. And of course no one in the line said anything, except the foreigner, who temporarily abandoned his bags to tap the paterfamilias on the shoulder and tell him in Mandarin to get to the back, at which point he said he was only standing there waiting for the line to go past him. This met with a sceptical response from me, and much giggling from the other Chinese in the line at his discomfiture.

I spent two nights at the new Mandarin Oriental in Ginza, another of these tower-top hotels, and with considerable style, not that I saw much of it due to a busy schedule (thank you TCVB) bustling around sumo beya (training stables) and kodo (appreciation of incense) meetings, and catching up with friends and acquaintances. Every time I'm in Tokyo I dine with former colleagues from my former life in arts marketing, and who worked on the UK Japan Festival 1991. On this occasion we were joined by someone from the cultural department of the Japanese Embassy in London at the time, but who is now one of Japan's most senior civil servants and an advisor to the Prime Minister, so I think everyone felt it was something of an honour that he gave up three hours for what turned out to be an excellent evening all round.

Then I flew north to Hokkaido for a trekking trip which turned out to be one of the least well-run organised tours I've ever been on--in fact the word 'organised' is hardly appropriate. I've experienced other tours this company runs, and I'm sure it's going to be knocked into shape (the other tours are excellent, and one is amongst my favourite travel experiences). But if this was my first time with them I'd be telling the editors who've commissioned the story that we shouldn't run it. (And that, incidentally, would make me a very rare freelance indeed.)

I was with a group of people some of whom had an annoying obsession with the idea that they were going to be written about, and one of whom threatened to sue if I did. This was despite the fact that the tour organisers had introduced me (I really wish they wouldn't do that--and they might have consulted me first) and mentioned that I was writing about the *tour* not the *tourists*. I often have to wonder in these cases what on earth is going on in people's minds in these cases. They turned out to be a well-read, well-travelled bunch with broad interests and in the end intrigued to know what I might have to say about the chaos they had just experienced, and which, while occasionally taking the organisers on one side to issue reproaches, they were determined to make the best of. I was decidedly glad that they were mainly Australians and not Americans or British, both of whom would have made the whole trip miserable by doing nothing but complain.

But there were some very good moments providing plenty of good material to work with, and the exercise was very welcome, although I was creaking by the end, and I didn't even do all the climbs.

I had a further day in Tokyo, picking up my latest Hiroshige ukiyo-e and doing a little shopping for stationery (my favourite notebooks come from Mujiroshi, although the best square, trouser-pocket-sized ones have been discontinued).

One final evening in Shanghai was used for a quick hotel review and bar update, during which I accepted too many glasses of champagne and too many cocktails, and as a consequence only got to sleep at 5am, and slept for a fitful few hours before having a tour of the hotel with a curiously reluctant PR, and then lunch before getting off to the airport. I slept on the flight, and have had much less difficulty than usual throwing off jet lag. So maybe this staying up all night before leaving Asia is a strategy I should adopt in future, although just at the moment I shudder to think of going back. This will probably wear off.

So I'm back, feeling alienated as usual, although oddly not as alienated as sometimes, possibly due to the same fairly continuous contact with home via Skype that may also have kept me more distant from China than usual while I was there. But Vancouver still seems as effortlessly fatuous as ever. Let's have a conversation about insulated coffee mugs.

Much following-up, tidying-up, planning for possible Europe in September and Middle East in February; a book to edit; two features to submit in July, but otherwise the commission book looking fairly empty, meetings with editors in HK and Tokyo not having produced much.

So no break here. No two weeks on the couch. I'd better get on with it.

Oh, and courtesy of the Internet I discovered while away that my second child, if all goes well between now and the due date in November, will be a girl. This brought a big smile to my face in Narita while waiting for the Shanghai flight.

Whistler

2006-05-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

In the last ten days or so I've filed six stories on everything from sheepdog trials in Adelaide to climbing the Rock of Gibraltar. At the same time I've been dealing with the HKTB, TCVB, Visit Britain, Tourism BC, Tourism Vancouver, Tourism Whistler, three different photographers, four different editors, innumerable hotels and PR agencies, and one publisher. In short I've been rather busy doing what I do more of than anything else--administration.

And the reason this entry is labelled 'Whistler'? Because at about ten day's notice, I was asked if I could run up here and do something for a magazine. To their credit the tourism people over here moved swiftly to accommodate me, and this is written from a suite in a boutique hotel right in Whistler village, after day spent first trying out something called a Sno-Limo (don't trust me on spelling here--I don't have the press kit in front of me), and then going out bear watching (two spotted--it's early in the season). My wife and child are with me for a change, and I've half a bottle of a half-decent merlot, compliments of the hotel, at my elbow.

Today was rather a good day. Both the Sno-Limo and the bear watching made good copy and the weather was balmy in Whistler village, but with three inches of new powder up on the mountain some of which my Sno Limo was the first to carve. Good for photography all round. Two days up here, one doing some follow-up in Vancouver, one day to write, and the next I'm on the plane to Hong Kong to get two more stories researched and have a few further meetings with editors.

And right now I must get to work on today's tape so that my day of writing won't begin with tedious hours of transcription.

Tomorrow a wander round the village, a treetop walk and zipline ride, a spa visit, and dinner at one of my favourite BC restaurants (the Bearfoot Bistro), although it's with someone from Tourism Whistler, so a lot of shop will be talked.

Now a couple of hours at the keyboard before bed.

Frommer's China

2006-05-06T22:50:00.000-07:00

Guidebook writing is a problematic business at the best of times, and not really an occupation suitable for adults. Nevertheless, when Frommer's approached me to put together the first edition of a single-volume China guide, I couldn't resist. It was something I'd always wanted to do, and although the Frommer's format was a something of a straitjacket, I accepted.

I selected the contents, chose and briefed the writers, wrote guidelines in addition to those provided by Frommer's and specifically related to the difficulties of covering China (see Writing China guides), and negotiated minor adaptations in Frommer's templates to fit the style of China. I wrote all the structural material and one of the gazetteer chapters myself, and edited all the other contributions.

Unfortunately we gradually added to the project by accepting the invitation to update two other overlapping titles, and in general the whole process was a complete nightmare. There was the editor who took it upon herself to rewrite the technical details of the hotel reviews using their websites for information. So when we'd left out the beauty salon because it actually functioned as a brothel, or the Jacuzzi because it had more rings than a sequoia, she added them back in. It had been a fight to get Frommer's to agree to having words in Romanized Chinese tone-marked (so readers could see how to pronounce them), as well as to add a limited number of Chinese characters, but accepted that for technical reasons they wouldn't appear on maps. This editor decided to add them herself, without any reference to the authors, and so, unsurprisingly, not being a Mandarin speaker, she missed out a lot of them and got others wrong. This then went to print without the proofs being seen by any of us.

Another editor imposed draconian deadlines for sections of her own title without reference to the fact that they clashed with those for the main China book. Two of these were at the beginning, it turned out, of ten-day periods spent out of the office--in each case ten days the authors could have used for vital improvements to the material. She also managed to lose all of the hand marked-up maps, so that they had to be done again, and when the book came out she'd extracted the wrong map of China from another title (twice the required size, so something else was cut), and full of errors, which she then published with place names full of Greek and mathematical symbols. Yes, it got right through the production process and into print in tens of thousands of copies (approx.--Frommer's regards the length of its print run as a trade secret it won't reveal to mere authors). As another editor remarked, 'Frommer's is a factory.' They just want to churn the books out on time and get them on the shelves.

The sub-editing process was truly astonishing. It seemed that the subs had not only never been to China, but had never even ventured over the county line. In between moving commas so as to make sentences mean exactly the opposite of what was intended, they would ask whether an Italian dish named in a restaurant review was French. Their ignorance of the outside world and of grammar was profound.

The editor on Frommer's China itself largely fought on our behalf to make the title what we wanted it to be. But it was only by accident that I got to see the text after its mauling by the subs, and few corrections were possible at that stage. Most of the maps I didn't see, but they were laden with the most absurd errors, most of which made it into print.

Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, and despite the dire Shanghai and Hong Kong chapters forced on me as cut downs from Frommer's existing titles, the book was something to be proud of. It was frank and accurate about China travel, and even at times witty. It was, in a sense, rather subversive--it didn't, like other Frommer's titles, pander to the American mind-set and typical ways of travelling, but instead told the truth about the country and set out to educate. It made it clear that other methods were better in China, explained in detail how and why, and just how much money and inconvenience might be saved, and how many scams avoided.

Frommer's doesn't want writers who rock the boat. Frommer's doesn't want the cosy beliefs of its older, American audience challenged with uncomfortable truths. It doesn't apparently want to serve its readership in that way. What it wants to do is to manufacture books on time and on budget and get them on the shelf earning money. The errors seem neither here nor there, and people who want to complain about them and put them right for the readers' sake are regarded as unhelpful.

In order to persuade me to take on this task, extravagant promises were made concerning updates. First refusal was always given to existing authors I was told. I was frequently referred to as 'our China guy', but nevertheless the promise was not kept, and as it was only a promise, not a contractual obligation, there was little to be done. Struggling to assign some sections for update, the company, with gritted teeth, reluctantly returned to me to offer just some sections of the China book, while having cut me dead on other China titles. But the money was derisory, and new contracts carried ridiculous penalty clauses. There were problems with scheduling payments. Wanting to preserve (and indeed improve on) the quality of what we'd done, and asked by some of the other original authors to do so, I looked at ways to accept the offer, but the terms and conditions offered bordered on abusive. Of the writers I chose only two had anything to do with the second edition, and then not with either of the two major sections each had tackled before.

While the question of tackling at least some parts of the second edition was still under discussion, I was forwarded a note from the publisher that while it included the remark, "never read a guide with more detailed, useful information. Our writers did an amazing job...." went on to say that some of the recommendations were 'silly', on the grounds that Americans wouldn't want to behave in the way we were suggesting was best. We'd given them the alternatives if they insisted on ignoring the advice, but he didn't seem to have read the book very thoroughly. But clearly what he felt to be the beliefs of his readers trumped the need for good advice these beliefs demonstrated they needed.

If I'd known such a clear view of China could be had from a comfy chair behind a desk in New York, I wouldn't have wasted time studying the language or spent a few years of my life there.

Frommer's works on a 'for hire' basis, which means that the authors sell their work for use in all media, for all time, in all parts of the known universe. That means that all the material appearing in the second edition, just published, even if it's word for word what went before (as much of it is), or with only minor changes (as most of the rest), the name of the updater is put down as the author of the chapter, and the name of the originator vanishes.

Looking at a copy in a bookshop the other day I was nevertheless angry to see so much of my own work with other people's names on, and not a word of credit. At the same time, as I saw how patchy the updating was, how lazy and cliche-ridden much of the new writing was, and how many of the changes I'd been back and seen for myself had been overlooked, I was glad to have no part of it. One map, full of errors first time round, now had even more, with several numbered dots on the map ludicrously failing to appear anywhere in the key.

The frame of the original material may support the book for a while, but it's clearly going to collapse to Frommer's usual levels within an edition or two (and don't get me started about earlier editions of other Frommer's China-related titles or we'll be here all night, with you not knowing whether to howl or weep at the stupidity of those books. One review of Frommer's Hong Kong on Amazon begins with the wish that if there's a hell for travel writers the author goes to it, a view with which I heartily agree.)

Here's a sample of what you have coming in the new edition of Frommer's China:

The Best of China

With a landmass of almost 10 million sq. km (4 million sq. miles), plus a further 5 million sq. km (2 million sq. miles) of water, no other single country can even come close to offering such a vast choice of destinations as the unimaginable vastness that is currently known as China.

Unimaginable vastness? The editing at Frommer's is getting worse and worse. Or perhaps the subs wrote this tripe. China is only about 260,000 square miles bigger than the USA, and dramatically smaller than Canada. I hope readers there are holding on tightly to their seats, or already having therapy to cope with living somewhere unimaginable. Fatuous.

The world’s foremost authority on China, Harvard professor John King Fairbank, declared that “our libraries are filled with writers who know all about China, but could not see how much they did not know.”

Isn't the foremost authority on China probably Chinese? Could you guess from this paragraph that Fairbank has been dead for 15 years? I wonder if the author knows that. Fatuous.

We concede that we have barely scratched the surface, especially when we consider that human history in this area stretches back almost two million years, much further than the much-vaunted “5,000 years of Chinese civilization,” yet even this is hardly a smudge on the far longer geologic record.

Setting aside the tortuous language of this almost unreadable sentence, and the soporific dullness of the '5000 years' cliche, what on earth are we supposed to take from it? Human history begins in Africa. The populating of what is now known as China was the result of two migrations from North Africa and Europe, one via Siberia, and one via a southerly route (incidentally making Northern Chinese genetically closer to Europeans than they are to Southern Chinese). So Europe has an even longer 'human history', and Africa longer still. What's the point?

And if by (ugh!) 'geologic record' we're referring to the physical structure, it does seem very likely that China was formed about the same time as the rest of the world. Surprise!

What utter tosh. How on earth does this kind of thing get into print? Are they all asleep at the wheel over there?

In many parts, the People’s Republic has only recently been opened to visitors, and so we have only had a few decades to unlock some of this enormous realm’s secrets. While we certainly do not claim to have uncovered everything, we have been truly inspired by this huge treasure house, and have included here what we have been able to find out so far, starting with what we think is some of China’s very best.

How unrelentingly pompous! What hubris! Who's the 'we' here? 'We' haven't had 'a few decades' in China but rather more like five minutes judging from some of the updating, so it's just as well 'we' aren't claiming 'have uncovered everything'.

God help us all. Where's my pith helmet and machete? I'm off to discover China, Carruthers.

If you've read Writing China guides then you'll know this kind of drivel couldn't have, and didn't, make it into the first edition.

The opinions of some of the other original contributors (as exchanged by private email) are fairly sulphurous, and one, Josh Chin, has already said his piece on his Ch-Infamous blog, here:

A tired collection of unimaginably tired cliches

Pulp non-fiction

2006-04-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

Mild palpitations today.

I was in a bookshop that specialises in flogging off remaindered stock at discount prices, but that also sells a limited selection of new and specialist books at a discount.

I was buying a stock of reading to leave as a surprise care package for my wife when I go away in a few weeks, when the spine of a book in the travel section caught my eye.

It was Beijing, my second book.

I've often wondered what it would feel like to see a title remaindered. After a few years the remaining copies of my first book China: The Silk Routes were actually pulped rather than remaindered, and the title now does a lively second-hand trade.

Beijing was the product of 18 months' work and a great deal of sweat, and remains far and away the most comprehensive guide to the city. But I've been wrangling with Cadogan for three or four years over whether a new edition will be produced or not. The company spent two or three years frequently insisting it was very interested in doing another edition when stock of the first edition ran low, but then suddenly reversed itself. However, the title is still selling well (very surprising given that it's six years old) and while a promise has been made to return the rights to me, no date has been set.

However, if a book is remaindered, it's out of print. And according to the contract if it's out of print then a formal letter requesting the return of the rights can be issued, and they must be returned within a limited period after that unless a contract for a new edition is issued.

So I asked the assistant, and he told me the book had indeed been remaindered. This came as something of a shock, although no surprise that Cadogan's right hand wouldn't even be aware than its left hand existed. (Much as I've enjoyed writing two titles for the company, planning and administration have never been its strong points.)

However, it turned out that this was no indication that the title itself had been remaindered, but merely this particular copy of the book. Distributors, I was told, often have a policy of treating all returned books as too damaged to re-issue for sale elsewhere, and so they are sold to stores such as the one I was in for a nominal remainder cost.

Cadogan knows I've been looking for another publisher to re-issue Beijing and Silk Routes in new, updated editions, but the results so far have been an illustration of the state of guide book publishing as a whole.

Cadogan doesn't want to do a new edition because it feels it has to become a niche publisher and its strength is Europe.

The MD of an American publisher had exchanged email over the years with me saying how wonderful he thought Beijing was, and had talked to me about doing China guides for his company, and sent me writing guidelines, etc. He professed to be delighted when I told him the rights were coming available, but in the end he simply said he'd changed his mind and if I'd call him he'd explain why. I thought having led me on for so long he should at least have the courtesy to make the effort to contact me himself. So I suppose I'll never know why. It was a complete waste of time.

One British publisher was enthusiastic enough to arrange a meeting, and I drove halfway across the UK for lengthy discussions at which it was said that the timing was excellent because the company also wanted to become a niche publisher, and was abanding European coverage for long-haul destinations, many of which, but not including China, it had already covered. The person I met brought a nice blank note pad to the meeting, and when he left some hours later it was equally blank. I was told by email a few weeks later that in fact the company would be issuing no new titles for the next few years. The meeting had been a complete waste of time.

Another British company was very enthusiastic by email, and had me send them copies of both books. When we spoke on the phone it seemed that my books overlapped with what they had covered of China already, but I was told that that wasn't an issue. So I sent in the books. A few weeks later I was told that the company wasn't interested because there was an overlap. Sending in the books had been a complete waste of time.

Right now I've given up, and sooner or later, unless Beijing also gets pulped, I'm really going to come across remaindered copies.

Any publishers out there want to take on guides to parts of China with excellent reviews? Just click on the Some of my books link on the right.