Somewhere out there, right now, everyone's dream vacation awaits. It is a collective dream, created by travel journalists who describe, in a cascade of cliches and superlatives, a world of white-sand beaches, quaint villages and smiling locals eager to share their secret knowledge. It is a world in which all places, regardless of location, history or culture, embody a "bewitching blend of the ancient and modern."
Chuck Thompson demolishes the dream in Smile When You're Lying, his acidic take on travel journalism and the multitudinous horrors that lie just beyond the airline check-in counter. As a longtime freelance travel journalist and the founding editor of Travelocity's short-lived magazine of the same name, he knows the score and he tallies it accurately.
"Actual travelers exist in real time and have to deal with the kinds of troubles that don't end up as body copy between splashy photos of a beach at dawn and coconut-encrusted prawns in honey-melon-okra dipping sauce at cocktail hour," Thompson writes. "Actual travelers have to deal with actual travel."
Actual travel might involve being seated next to a woman who, on a long international flight, scrapes and sands her callused feet, flicking bits of dead skin on your leg. Or being rolled by four Thai women and left without a penny on a remote island. Or, to draw on one of Thompson's most colorful foreign adventures, it might involve standing on a deserted stretch of highway in the Philippines at 3am, desperately waiting for an arriving bus, as eight machete-wielding men emerge from the brush and approach for a friendly chat.
These and other outtakes from his reporter's notebook add spice to Thompson's dead-on demolition job. The book is a savagely funny act of revenge for years spent servicing the travel fantasies of gullible readers, the kind who truly believe that acting like a local in London means, as one tourist guide urges, eating at one of the city's "few surviving pie 'n' mash shops." As Thompson inconveniently points out, if only a few such shops remain, "it stands to reason that not many of London's 12 million locals are eating much pie 'n' mash."
Thompson lashes out wildly. Over the years, logging many thousands of travel kilometers, he has compiled an impressive hate list. His least favorite destinations include New Zealand ("a junior-varsity version of the Pacific Northwest"), Colorado (Kansas with big hills), Austin ("if it wasn't surrounded by Texas it'd be called Sacramento"), the entire Caribbean ("a miasmic hellscape") and Eric Clapton.
Eric Clapton is not a destination, but Thompson, a former rock 'n' roll drummer and Nick Hornby-scale obsessive, does not care. In one of many insanely digressive passages, he foams at the mouth about Clapton's supposedly inflated reputation. Having settled the question to his satisfaction, he returns to it again when describing an ill-fated tour he once made in East Germany with a band called the Surf Trio. Then he has the cheek to complain about travel writers who think they're the story.
The music trivia aside, Thompson makes self-indulgence work for him. He throws in everything: his boyhood years in Juneau, his experience as an English teacher in rural Japan, his journalistic forays into weird corners of the earth for magazines like Escape, and his adventures gathering material for two guidebooks on World War II sites in Europe and the Pacific.
His personal encounters with the dark side of travel carry the book, which is more memoir than expose. He has suffered greatly, but pain only makes him laugh, even when it's a dense carpet of ants crawling up his legs in a squalid Brazilian hotel room.
Along the way Thompson has accumulated, if not wisdom, some useful tips. It is worth remembering that in the US "spicy" means "not spicy." In Thailand the word means "it's going to taste like someone shoving a blowtorch down your throat for the next 25 minutes." No white man, he cautions "should ever wear a sarong, not even in private."
In a chapter on the workings of the travel industry Thompson strongly recommends lying whenever possible to gain extra discounts on cars, hotel rooms and air tickets. No one knows that you are not the regional sales director for Microsoft. If your batteries die mid-flight, rubbing them briskly on your leg to generate static electricity can prolong their life for as much as an hour or two.
"This also works in cheap hotels where they never change the batteries in the remote," he writes.
A cloud of guilt envelops Thompson as he writes, conscious that he and his travel-porn cohorts have strip mined the earth of its most precious resource: pleasant, undiscovered destinations.
"We venerate what we destroy," he writes. "But first we destroy." By the time he got around to returning to Eastern Europe, travel journalism had done its work, specifically television travelers like Rick Steves and the Lonely Planet guides, two of Thompson's favorite targets.
"Every description sounded as if it had been lifted from a feminine-hygiene-spray commercial," he writes of one of Steves' Eastern European video tours. "Seas glistened. Cities sparkled. Hungary was a 'goulash' of influences. And, of course, the Croatian city of Split was the usual fascinating blend of ancient and modern."
How about South America instead? "Second only to the Himalayas for mountain drama, the turbulent beauty of the Andes" — but wait, could this description possibly be written by none other than Thompson? As he duly notes, travel journalists are a little like alcoholics, doomed to repeat the same story in the same words. Backsliding, apparently, is always a danger.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist