Travel writings
Trip Start
Feb 29, 2004
1
27
33
Trip End
Nov 24, 2004
Hue,
Vietnam
Friday, October 15, 2004
ROUGH WORK
I'm here to update the Vietnam chapter of a Southeast Asia guidebook, covering all major sights and destinations north of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon). I had agreed to do it without ever having visited Vietnam, and without knowing if 30 days would be enough to cover my destinations. On my first day in Hanoi I hardly left the hotel, sleeping long in the much cooler and less sticky climate, and making a frighteningly tight travel schedule to cover all 19 different cities/destinations efficiently. The plan was to cover the north first (while in the south the rain season would come to an end) and then head south, ending up on the beach for a day of R&R before going back to Hong Kong.
Being paid to try out a tropical destination and write about it sounds great, and it often is, but I feel I have to remind you all of the terrible hardships involved. You have to visit places you may not want to visit at all. There's often no reason to visit lovely sights of which the descriptions don't change anyway. The people who were on your bus head for the beach, while you head to check out another bunch of identikit hotels. And in the end you're travelling alone with little chance of fraternising with fellow travellers for long. I'd often rather be drinking a beer with you, dear reader. On the plus side, I was on a paid whirlwind tour of Vietnam!
Updating a guidebook involves visiting every city and town in the book and checking everything that was published in the previous edition (now three years old), in the meantime looking for new hotels, restaurants and bars to add. The problem with researching is that you can't give any meaningful recommendation before you've seen a fair selection of the places to choose from, or have an expat or local who can help you out.
Central Vietnam has an annoying amount of small towns (requiring only a few hours of research time) spaced very far apart. So that means getting up before 06:00 to catch the early morning bus for a 4-7 hour ride to reach the next town; after finding a cheap hotel or a place to leave my bags I then zip around town, walking into hotels to check prices and room descriptions, seeing if restaurants still merit a mention and collecting notes and business cards, and then either moving on to the next town or leaving that until (probably) early the next morning. To keep sane, after a day of checking two destinations I limited myself to one destination and a bit of rest the following day... but I still managed to clock up about 1150 daytime kilometres and 10 destinations in 10 days, on the Hué - Da Nang - Hoi An - Quang Ngai - My Lai - Kon Tum - Buon Ma Thuot - Nha Trang - Da Lat - Mui Ne bus marathon. I wouldn't recommend it for a holiday.
After I'm back, I'll sit down for a week to plough through the bumph and type it all up, swigging Chinese beer whilst wondering what to do with exhilarating brochure texts like "The Hanoi International Club is the first international standard slot machine lounge in Hanoi featuring the latest slot machines". Someone's got to do it.
Usually I don't tell anyone what I'm collecting information for; the idea is that if I get treated badly or food poisoning, it could also have been you dining out with me on a Vietnam holiday, dear reader. The exception is hotels, where I need to see a few rooms (the salary unfortunately not allowing me to test every five-star hotel in town). Unlike normal travellers, I thoroughly enjoy getting bad treatment or visiting smelly hotels, as I can apply revenge to feel better afterwards - blast them in the text, or scrap them altogether.
I'm very aware that what we write in the guides can really influence the success of somebody's business to a certain degree; this is much more obvious with Lonely Planet (our competition, with books that are just as useful but better known and marketed). Quite a few hotels and guesthouses have some kind of sign saying 'recommended by Lonely Planet'; some also mention other publications like Rough Guides or Les Guides Routards. I wonder what the Lonely Planet writers think when they update their books. Some places even go as far as naming themselves Lonely Planet and copying their logo - a reason for me not to list them at all.
In some towns, this practice has gone so far that I saw a hotel that advertised itself as 'NOT listed in the Lonely Planet!' (in Dali, China). There's not much that the guidebook publishers can do about the self-recommendations; we could threaten to scrap places from the listings, but then we'd just be denying the readers information they have paid for, and have the right to know. So I've been silently scrapping a handful of the all-too-obvious backpacker places and replacing them with good backstreet alternatives. My two cents.
In Vietnam, some 'unlisted' restaurants have a page in their menu listing the e-mail addresses of guidebooks for their clients to recommend their venues. I don't think this strategy works though, as in the stack of reader's mail I have, not one seems to be inspired by restaurant owners, but rather by enthusiastic users of the book.
A foreign bar owner in Vietnam (before I had told him what I was in town for) told me that the café business is very hard until you get mentioned in the Lonely Planet; he'd had a visit from them the previous month and has good hopes for to next year's edition.
Sometimes you get crap from venue owners who aren't happy with one of the previous books. Often I'll find out they don't know what they're talking about and are mixing up guidebook publishers or are talking about the 1993 edition, but in the case of real complaints, as a freelancer I can just promise to pass the information on. Sometimes I have to remind them that we're doing them a favour - it's good free publicity after all - and that we don't write with their business in mind, but the reader.
I'd go so far as to say that from the reader's point of view, it's sometimes better to visit a restaurant *not* listed in one of the big guidebooks. The problem being that as soon as a 'touristy' place gets listed in the big guides, there's a chance it goes bad. With a guaranteed flow of clients that will not be coming back anyway, you can afford to cut down on quality and service. And indeed, quite a few of the 'recommended by' places serve pretty bland food at slightly-too-high prices, riding on the wave of published popularity. It's the unlisted places that will try hardest to impress.
You could blame this all on the users of guidebooks, who are not inclined to visit an unlisted hotel or restaurant; the places with the 'recommended by' signs will always be busy with young book-clutching Westerners. But there's a lot of unfair criticism of people who intensely use guidebooks, saying they're using them too much as a bible holding the Only Truth (flattering as it is to us writers). And indeed, in some restaurants you'll see half a dozen Lonely Planet books on the tables, resulting in an aversion of LP users by some travellers. But that's what they bought the book for - to get good recommendations that will save them the hassle of trawling around town themselves to find the best option. I pity the unprepared travellers who end up missing out on knowledge that will greatly enrich their experience of the destination, who waste time missing alternative transport connections, and who end up spending more money than necessary. I think travelling with a book, making informed choices based on what's written and what's recommended by people you meet, and really trying to understand the place you are travelling makes for a much more rewarding trip.
The popularity of guidebooks has grown so much that the Vietnamese have started a little industry making very professional photocopied books, complete with hard colour cover and coloured photo pages inside. You can buy a complete Lonely Planet and Rough Guide locally for a few euro, as opposed to €15-30 at home. Maybe it's a suitable punishment for our dubious influence on the state of local businesses.
While I was checking out two places in a small street full of guesthouses in Hué, word got out what I was doing, and more guesthouse owners came up to me asking me to see their places - but it was impossible to see them all; the space in the guide and my time are limited so I had to disappoint some of them. At moments like this I realise that what I write effects more than simply the decision process of a reader.
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Next up: south to Ho Chi Minh City
