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i-ID: 172 |
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| Flying Blind |
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| Iqaluit, Canada. |
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Once upon a time I worked for a magazine called Meetings & Conventions. It was a trade magazine covering -- you guessed it -- the meetings and conventions industry. It was a good place to work as a writer and later as an editor. Despite M&C's lack of glamour (and budget), we tried hard to keep the writing crisp and the design current. It wasn't a consumer book, but we made it pretty damn close.
There were a number of things that made the job fun, but let's cut the shit: it was the travel that kept most of us there more years than we ever intended. Because the travel was crazy. You don't know about the world of travel writers; most citizens don't. See, there are things called fam trips (short for familiarization) or, more specifically, press trips. A fam trip works like this: a travel supplier -- a country, city, hotel, convention center or cruise ship -– invites five or six travel writers to come and inspect the product. You stay in the biggest suites in the best hotels. You eat at the finest restaurants. You tour all the attractions. And you never, ever spend a cent of your own money.
Why did these suppliers treat us so well? Duh. They wanted us to go back and write glowing reviews of their hotels, cities, whatever. We rarely did (in its destination coverage M&C stuck to facts and avoided editorializing and crass promotion), but that never discouraged the suppliers from inviting us back for more rare wines and local cheeses. And pillow gifts. Oh, the pillow gifts.
Yet there was a dark side to these trips, and I'm not talking about the golf shirts, tote bags and crystal mementos that kept popping up on my pillows like Christmas fruitcakes from Claudia Dukeshire (an old M&C joke). You wouldn't believe how many hours we had to spend touring hotel meeting facilities, traipsing around convention centers, fingering swatches of a ballroom's new carpet –- all the time suffering the humiliation of taking marching orders from a chirpy public relations chaperon while surrounded by "colleagues" whose company was rarely more than tolerable and frequently far less. A few low points? I'll give you one: The tour of the facility in India owned by Taj Hotels at which airline meals were prepared and packed. Two hours over rutted dirt roads to get there, three hours watching how peas were boiled grey and packed into styrofoam containers, two hours back to Delhi on the same rutted dirt roads. Roughly one-twelfth of my visit to India was devoted to watching airline food roll off conveyor belts. Oh, and our guide was a follower of the guru Meyababa, who evidently found nirvana hitting on the female writers unfortunate enough to be stuck next to him on the minibus. Classy.
That said, many of the trips were extraordinary. My shtick was to plump for the third world and out-of-the-way trips and let others snap up the excursions to Tuscany and the Caribbean. I figured there was plenty of time for that sort of thing later, in my dotage. There still is.
During these years of frequent travel I developed a love of photography while at the same time realizing I had absolutely no talent for it. Of the thousands of pictures I took (or as photojournalists like to say, "made." Sheesh.) in countries all over the world these few are the only ones that are even halfway decent. By no standards are they good. The best photo I ever took, of this drunken Inuit fighting with his wife, was lost by the assistant photo editor at M&C. The fact that I have a photograph of her dressed as a streetwalker is no consolation.
Most of the photographs in this portfolio were taken on fam trips; others, like those from Chile, Thailand and Yemen, were from trips I actually bought and (sort of) paid for myself. And before you start thinking, "Wow, he really did get around," I would like to point out that you have absolutely no idea. These pictures are just from a small sample of trips. I've checked out of more hotels than most people will ever see in a lifetime of watching the Travel Channel. Which doesn't make me better than you. Just less impressed by Ian Schrager.
Although they are presented in chronological order, this first photo is out of sequence. It seemed appropriate for this introductory page. This is the pilot of the private jet that flew us to Teterboro airport in New Jersey from Ilulissat, a small village on the west coast of Greenland. As dawn broke over the Canadian Arctic we landed to refuel in Iqaluit, on Baffin Island.
Despite its drawbacks, travel writing was a pretty cool job. |
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