BCAA Travel Blog

I landed my first travel writing gig purely by accident. This was many years ago when a lot of things in my life were happening by accident. A writer friend of mine had been invited to participate in a fam trip to Hong Kong and Thailand, two destinations that I, as an impoverished freelancer, had never even considered visiting. I was so new to the game I didn’t even know what “fam trip” meant (it’s short for familiarization trip). Anyway, since he was unable to join the excursion, he nominated me to take his spot. What a stroke of luck.

It turned out to be an incredible 10 days of exotica. I can still vividly recall returning to my hotel room that first night in Hong Kong, slick with sweat and jazzed with adrenaline, after riding a double-decker tram across the city. The entire place pulsated with a feverish energy–blazing neon, street markets, rushing crowds, and construction crews working under floodlights. It was impossible not to get swept away.

The Thailand leg of the trip was even more mind-blowing. I rode an elephant, took a river cruise, had a giant python draped around my neck and attended a night of Thai boxing at a sauna bath of a stadium packed with shouting, wild-eyed gamblers. There was also a visit to a Bangkok brothel arranged by a celebrity chef who had joined the junket as much because of his taste for foreign flesh as his love of Thai spices. We entered a massive room, one side of which was taken up by a glass wall. Behind the glass several dozen attractive, young Thai women sat on red cushioned bleachers, each with a number pinned to their clothing. Needless to say, I was instantly hooked on the possibilities of travel writing.

I soon discovered that junkets of this type were fairly common and I began cultivating contacts in public relations departments and in the airlines who could facilitate further trips. As I became more savvy I discovered that you with a little ingenuity, you could piece together a dandy foreign excursion on your own. When I decided I wanted to visit Malaysia, I got an assignment letter from Western Living magazine stating that it would publish a feature article on the country. I used that letter to wangle a free flight to Kuala Lumpur, and then to arrange free accommodation, transportation and personal guides in Malaysia for my two-week stay. I saw the entire country, including the states of Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo, plus a stunning resort on Tioman Island in the South China Sea, without spending hardly any money at all. In fact, after I received my payment for the article, I came out ahead on the deal. I ended up selling the piece twice, one version to Western Living and another to Discovery, Cathay Pacific Airlines inflight magazine.

Getting freebies in those days was easier than it is now. The cost-conscious airlines are much stingier about handing out free tickets and arranging trip details was much more casual. Today, corporate types usually guard the gratis gates and you need to follow procedures. Even so, I’ve used the travel writing gambit to see Britain, Spain, Mexico, Russia, Japan, Hawaii, Fiji, Indonesia, Bali, Kenya, Tanzania, and a whack of other destinations in the mainland U.S. and Canada, all of them taken on someone’s else’s ticket. Some of these journeys were made solo, others with media reps, a couple in tandem with photographers and a few with my family. Every trip is different, which is a key ingredient in their appeal. Although I’ve never exclusively specialized in travel writing, it has become an important and enjoyable component of my freelance portfolio. Most of the assignments I take on are feature pieces that require a fair amount of research, as well as spending time in a destination. This is no hardship, of course, but it is not terribly lucrative. You are not earning money when you are travelling and unlike footloose photographers, a writer’s work isn’t done when he returns home from a trip. You still have to sit down in front of your computer and churn out copy. What did it look, sound, feel and smell like? The blank page and the blinking cursor demand an answer.

Filed under: Life as a Travel Writer