![]() Pre-trip research is a huge part of the deal, but also on the ground, as you go. Solid planning is essential-it isn’t quite a military expedition, but it isn’t far off. ![]() A lot of the time it is a small step above data collection and it can be mundane. You don’t have to find one good hotel, you need to find twenty. You don’t just need to know what time the bus goes from A to B, you need to know where all the buses to everywhere go, how long they take, what they cost, etc. Travel guide research is a different beast to feature writing, and the work can be monotonous. What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process? The hardest thing is often having to leave somewhere you’ve realized you love, and likewise staying somewhere you hate. Travel writer Celeste Brash once described travel writing as “seeing everything but experiencing nothing,” and I strongly agree with that. The workload and the pace of travel can be exhausting. Otherwise, writer Freda Moon wrote some very kind words about Travelfish in the New York Times, and yes, even today, that makes my day.Īs a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road? So I guess I’d say the “break” was seeing that as the way to do it. I’ve mostly written for Travelfish, as I found freelance too frustrating to rely on. What do you consider your first “break” as a writer? Then the currency crisis came along and I moved on to other typical work in Bangkok (a bit of travel freelance for local publications, teaching English, embassy work, and a long stint at a newspaper), and launched Travelfish with Samantha in 2004. ![]() Two years later, we published a guidebook to Thailand. (I’ve since learned plenty about guidebooks, and considering the difficulties the writers would have faced putting it together at the time, it was solid.) So a couple of friends and myself tried to do something better, and self-published a Vietnam guidebook in ’95. The Lonely Planet guidebook I was using, to my novice eyes back then, didn’t seem very good. The country had only really “reopened” to independent travel a couple of years earlier, so it was pretty rough and ready travel (i.e. The 1990s were a great time to travel in Southeast Asia. I’ve been here ever since, living in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. It was love at first sight, and I’ve been in the region on and off since, returning for six months every year since ’94 and moving to Southeast Asia in ’97. In late ’93 I arrived late at night at Don Muang airport on a flight from Kathmandu, and I walked out of the terminal, smelt the air and it seemed everyone had a motorbike. At the time I knew nothing of the region, India had been my focus, and I picked Bangkok for no reason other than I knew where it was. ![]() Later, in 1992, I purchased a RTW ticket ex-Sydney, and as a part of that I had to pick a port in Southeast Asia as a part of the ticket. I think that period is what planted the travel seed in me. I started traveling early, off the back of my father’s work, living in Japan, South Korea and Italy in the late 70s and early 80s. He currently lives in Bali with his partner Samantha, their two kids, and their dog Skye Govinda. He cofounded Travelfish in 2004, and has been writing about the region since 1997. Stuart McDonald is an Australian travel writer based in Indonesia.
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