No. 8

Winter 2005

The Reality of the Place: An Interview with Tom Haines
Missy Raterman

Tom Haines is the staff travel writer at The Boston Globe. In 2000, the Journalists in Europe Foundation awarded Haines their top prize; last year, Haines was named Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of Travel Writers. His writing has also appeared in the 2004 edition of The Best American Travel Writing.

Haines' most recent project is the Boston Globe's on-going four-part series, Crossing Divides, on which he has completed work with photographer Essdras M. Suarez. To find these articles and links to more of Tom Haines' travel writing, click here

Missy Raterman is an MFA student in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh.


My first question is, when did you start traveling?

What got me out of the door?

Right.

Well, I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh -- so basically, "Suburbia USA." My parents were great in the sense that they encouraged us to get out into the world -- in my childhood, that pretty much meant family car trips, camping, that sort of thing. My parents had both studied abroad in college -- my dad in Spain and my mom, well, she didn't study abroad but she traveled all around Europe -- so there was always an awareness in our family that there was a world beyond what we saw here at home.

I studied abroad for a semester in college, but [my continued travels] really came about after I had been working in this very staid, boring job as a computer programmer for a bank. There were 12 guys from England on my project. It's very much part of the British and Australian culture for people to just sort of take off and travel. I was sitting there moaning about how I was going to quit the consulting job and go to graduate school for journalism, and they all said, "Oh, dude, you have to go to Southeast Asia, you have to go to Indonesia and Thailand . . . " So I did. I traveled for three months, which is my only sort of solo, wandering experience. This was in 1992, and I'm 36 now. This was before internet cafes and cell phones -- not like it was the dark ages, but there was no immediate communication with family and friends. This was very defining for me, as far as just getting out into the world -- both personally finding myself in places where I was removed from my own context and [also] to see, firsthand, other cultures. At that time I had no ambitions to be a travel writer, so I didn't write anything about it -- I just sort of hung out. I think this ended up being really helpful. It's good to do something first, I think, before writing about it.

That was actually going to be one of my questions -- whether travel writing is something you had aspired to, or if it was something that came along as a natural progression at the right time in your career?

It's funny -- I met up with a college friend in Hong Kong for a week. He tells me at that point, I told him I wanted to be a travel writer, but I don't remember that. I think he misunderstood because at that time I wanted to be a news reporter. I spent ten years being a news reporter. I went to Berkeley for journalism school, and then worked at The Seattle Times and at a little paper in Idaho -- covering small town murder and Fourth of July parades where the premiums were on accuracy, clarity and communication. The last thing they wanted to know was my impression of anything. I did [news journalism] until about 3 years ago, when I ended up as a staff travel writer for The Globe. After The Times and before The Globe, I spent three years doing freelance work in Europe. Then, when my wife and I came back to the States and were trying to get "grown up" again -- get our sort of "big jobs" -- I interviewed for a news job at the Globe. The editor I had been working for said that I should go talk with the travel editor and pitch him some stories, although at the time I had never written a travel piece. I still had no job and was just trying to freelance. I went to the travel editor, was pitching him ideas and telling him some stories, when he leaned in and said well, you know, I am looking to hire a travel writer.

Initially, I actually was not interested because a lot of newspaper travel writing, in my opinion, is very consumer-focused. This is fine if you want to know, for instance, what is the best beach to visit in the Caribbean. As for the subject matter of this consumer focus, it wasn't something that interested me very much. Also, the writing can end up mimicking a family slide show of someone's vacation. Unless you happen to be one of the small minority who will take a vacation to this beach, why endure all the rather mundane narrative to get a little information about what restaurant to go to on your vacation? My attitude was, since The Boston Globe had plenty of freelance writers to cover the 500 word beach story, they should get a little more from me, especially if they were going to be paying me a salary, a 401K plan, my expenses and my health insurance. As a journalist coming from the news side, I wanted to be able to write about news that was going on in the world and use travel as a chance to write about different cultures. So the next day I called the recruiting person, told them I had changed my mind and did want to be a travel writer.

Do you feel that being on staff versus doing more freelance, as you had been beforehand, offered you an opportunity to grow or experiment more in your writing?

Definitely. It's been a process. I grew during the period when I was doing freelance because it was different, but there's nothing like growing with the resources of a major newspaper backing you. In this way, it has allowed me to focus on the substance more. When you are freelancing, you are much more concerned with issues of how you're going to get to a place and how you're going to pay your way – things you have to worry about before you even get to the story. So it's an unusual, but fortunate position I've found myself in.

The pieces of yours I've read since you've been at The Globe seem successful in your ability to put some of yourself into the article while developing a story about the place. You seem to employ different techniques depending on the story. I noticed in your article, "Seeking Heaven in the Stubborn Earth," there are a lot more geographical facts in your descriptions, whereas as in, "Balkans in the Balance," you use a lot more dialogue to relate the experience. How do you find a balance between these -- descriptions of place and of the people you meet -- and still manage to construct your own persona or voice for the article?

My attitude on this point is that if you have something to say compelling about yourself, fine, but it better be pretty compelling because you've come all the way to this place, which is a place with a complete culture of its own, its own society and history, usually an amazing place -- and you are going to tell me about yourself. How often do you read those stories like, "I was walking along the streets of Phnom Penh, and I was overloaded with the sights and sounds . . . " and you, the reader, are thinking, "What are the sights and sounds this person is experiencing and why do I care if they're overloaded?"

This is not to say that there aren't some stories like this that work, particularly if someone then delivers on it and the reader understands why the writer has a connection to the place, or whatever the situation may be. Still, I think that the standard has to be pretty high when you introduce yourself into the story -- not necessarily if you're doing this as part of the narrative, such as "I went here . . . ; We went there . . ." in order to move the plot along, but more if you are making a point about your perceptions. You need to be aware of the risks and be sure you've really developed yourself as a character that is as interesting as the setting in which you've found yourself.

I think this is a danger in travel writing since you, the writer, are often overwhelmed with the emotions of going into unfamiliar territory -- literally and figuratively. It's easy to become obsessed with your own responses and self-consciousness instead of writing about the things you are seeing -- the sights and sounds, as you referred to them earlier.

Yeah -- for example, if you read the travel section of The New York Times, a lot of their pieces are of this genre, which is to say in the first two or three paragraphs you will find the vertical pronoun, "I", and yet there is often little sense as to why you should care where or why that particular person is there.

Was this project (Crossing Divides) your vision?

Yeah, and credit -- or thanks, rather -- to The Globe editors for completely backing it and setting me up with the photographer, Essdras M. Suarez. We've just spent three months traveling around the world four times. We were in the Arctic, Africa, Asia, and South America. These were all separate trips; we went to South America in November, then came back and did some other stories. In April, we went to Russia and Alaska -- it was wintertime there so it was negative 30 degrees in the Arctic, and it was amazing. In June, we went to Africa -- the Sahara, where it was 120 degrees, and in August we went to Cambodia and Laos. Part of the reason for doing it in separate trips is that I have a wife and two young children so we were trying to juggle that, but also we wanted each trip to be a distinct story -- less a sort of, "hey, we're two guys traveling around and checking into an internet café" and more focused on journalism.

So, did you pitch the idea to the editors -- is that normally how your assignments work?

That's how it all works. On this one, the photographer was a good friend of mine. One day he popped up over the side of my desk, sort of like the neighbor in Home Improvement, and said, "Hey! We ought to do a series on great divides." I was not immediately convinced, thinking, "Ah, that's cool but it sounds more like a topic." It's great visually -- go and take pictures of the Himalayas -- but there isn't necessarily a story there.

I had been feeling a bit frustrated with my trips to that point. While exotic or interesting -- I'd been to Buenos Aires and Ethiopia, for example -- it was easy to get caught up in the habit trail of the airline. I'd swoop down to a capital city, run around, and next thing I knew I was eating a sandwich in some café but not really feeling like I was there. I didn't feel that I was in the reality of the place, which is often found in the remote regions away from capitals, and also I wasn't necessarily interacting with people or in the really awesome geographies, like the big mountains or huge deserts. So Essdras and I started talking, and thinking we should try to mix these two ideas of crossing borders in these great divides. There was no science to it; we thought, let's pick places that are compelling or interesting and have some geographic or cultural divide. We picked a broad theme -- "Crossing Divides" -- to operate as a hook. We needed a hook, before we approached the editors, that says to people, "This is what we are doing" and to indicate that each article is part of a bigger project. However, at the same time, Essdras and I wanted the freedom to write about whatever we found or to photograph whatever we found, and this hook allowed us the freedom to discover our story while in that place.

So that's that particular instance. Much more typical is that I will sit down with the travel editor with about six ideas and he'll have three or four. He won't like a couple of mine and I won't like a couple of his, but eventually we'll come up with one that we both feel good about.

Earlier, you had briefly mentioned a translator, which is an interesting element in travel writing because sometimes it can be overlooked in the writing of a travel experience. What has been your experience with translators? How do you go about hiring a translator? Have you found it awkward to have this intermediary voice between the people and places you experience and are writing about?

It depends. When I was doing foreign journalism, I was in this whole parallel universe of fixers and translators. I'd show up to say, Belgrade when Milosevic was getting kicked out, and there would be all these highly educated, fluent, English-speaking Serbian journalists who are hiring out their services to work with you. The Boston Globe then pays them, say, a hundred dollars a day to be my translator, and then I might tell this person that I want to talk to an oppositional politician, and this journalist has a speed dial on their cell phone to set it up. The stories I've done since being a staff writer at The Globe are closer to this type of reporting -- for example, the Ethiopian piece where I was going into a famine-stricken area. I basically act like a foreign correspondent. I interviewed NGOs, the Red Cross, the World Food Program, and knew that I was going to be hiring a translator to get me in the position where I could be in a village, talking to people. I think this would be more difficult to do as a traveler -- to show up with my hands in my pocket, look around and say to people, "Hey! Is there a place where I can stay the night?" It just doesn't work as well.

Having said that though, there are definitely stories I approach more as a traveler and decide I am not going to hire a translator in order to have the vulnerability of being an outsider. There was a story I did about Islamic Spain. When I went on this assignment, it was post 9/11 so I was looking for a topic that had some Islamic cultural elements to explore. Yet I decided that I didn't want to do it as a foreign journalist with a very highly qualified translator, because it puts you in a specific kind of mindset. I wanted to be more wide-eyed and a little more reactive. I did that assignment on my own. I speak French, and a lot of the Islamic population in Spain are people from Morocco or Algeria who speak French. I know very little Spanish, but enough to help me get around the city. The content suffered in the sense that there is not the great dialogue and fewer inside moments when someone who is from that country can sort of shepherd me and say, this is what I really need to see or focus on. Rather, this story has more of my reflection and the travel incidents a person just sort of happens upon when they do travel in this way. I find this kind of travel writing more representative of the sort of, great history of travel writing, when a person wanders through a place, talks to people, and writes their "take-away."

To lead into this question of what the traveler "takes away" from his or her experience, particularly when you are writing about it for a newspaper and there is an underlying presence of consumerism (for example, the articles you've written for The Globe that are followed by an "If you go…" box): do you worry about the risk of exploitation? I think this is an issue for any traveler and travel writer since when you enter a culture or location as the outsider there is not only the insight you take away, but also the imprint of what your presence there has left behind. How you translate this experience to other people once you have returned bares a certain level of responsibility. I read one instance where a woman had gone on a sort of "roots journey" to Italy in order to visit and write about the place where her ancestors came from, but when she met a woman who ran a restaurant there, she didn't present herself as a writer. When she came home to write this piece, she mentioned the restaurant, which spawned an influx of tourists to seek out the establishment. In this case it caused unwelcome business to the woman who ran the restaurant. She actually closed down her restaurant for a short time to discourage the popularity that had been gained by this writer's piece.

Yeah -- it's kind of the deal with the devil of being in the travel section, but I have different perspectives on the topic. The Ethiopian piece I wrote, for example, was followed by one of these, "If you go…" boxes. On the one hand, you are thinking, who is going to read this article and then actually decide to travel to Ethiopia. Yet Ethiopia has serious tourist infrastructure. A lot of Europeans go to see these old rock-carved churches; you don't hear that in the States. If you go there, you will see, for example, Germans get into a 4X4 to go off into the north country. So, it seems that is some way this helps the economy. Also, for this piece we had a second box that was a "How you can help . . ." which was very specific, even mentioning the NGO who works in the village I had visited. So who knows, out of the 700,000 copies printed, maybe 500 people will donate some money.

But you are right, this is obviously a concern, and the theory behind the Crossing Divides project is not that these trips are great journeys people should take, but rather that these are incredibly interesting and diverse parts of the world that we are going to tell you something about, some of them being places many of our readers might not have read much about previously. There was a sense for our readers that, maybe you want to go here, and if you do here's some state department information and a few internet sites where you can learn more about it. But it wasn't along the lines of, here's the contact for the hotel to stay at or the restaurants where you should eat. This way, if you are interested in going to these places, you have to first do the research on your own.

I'm not a big fan of the romance of travel, or a believer that everybody must go and see the world. If you want to see the world, go see the world, is more my attitude. I have two other examples along these lines. I went on a road trip to Argentina when the peso was being de-valued. All the headlines were about Argentina in chaos, but Argentina is this amazing, intense, diverse, and interesting country. I spent 12 days traveling with an Argentinean friend of mine, and we came across this one hotel -- this classic, roadside Argentinean hotel that went into my article, with the suggestion that if you go to Argentina, you can stay here. It costs $9, you hear the trucks all night, it's hot, there's no fans -- and if someone shows up there, maybe it helps the local economy. Are people really going to show up there . . . I don't know. From my perspective, I'd rather help people find these types of places than say, "Here are four hotels in Paris -- go have your romantic dream vacation."

Again, not that there is anything wrong with either type of article. Still, there is sort of this catch-22 where when you come back to write about an experience, and try to capture the authenticity of some serendipitous experience, that can lend itself to exploitation on some level. An example of this is a piece I wrote on Lake Umbagog in northern New Hampshire. The lake is in a wild life preserve, and a friend had told me that it's this amazing crossroads for migrating birds between the Arctic and the Caribbean. I went up there with a man who was a professional ornithologist. He sat there with his binoculars, pointing out things like, "The yellow-breasted tittle-mouse is doing something over here" and so on -- you almost thought it was a parody of the situation, like he was just making stuff up. After, I wrote this story on the life of birds in this place. I thought of it as a naturalist piece, yet it went in the travel section of the newspaper with an "If you go" box. The National Wildlife Reserve loved the exposure, but I got several angry emails from New Englanders who were like, "Thanks a lot, jerk, this is our secret place that isn't over-run by jet skis and bass fishermen." So, I felt some responsibility but at the same time, I rationalize it by thinking, well, at least having done the article in this way, hopefully the people that do go there will see the place as, you take a canoe, you sit back, you look, you listen, and just appreciate it.

I was reading this travel article today on World Hum.com about American backpackers who sew a Canadian flag to their backpacks when they travel abroad, and I noticed this when I was backpacking last summer.

I read that too -- so it's true?

Oh yeah, and to me, it seems to negate the entire reason to even set off traveling in the first place?

Yeah -- that to me, is the height of consumerist tourism. It's sort of like saying, I want to go out and see the world, but I don't want the world to know who I am -- like going undercover to have fun. And it's unnecessary. When we were doing our traveling for the series, we went to four different continents -- often remote places, though the villages themselves had 15,000 or 20,000 people -- and no one said a negative word to us: not so much as a sideways stare. In two and a half years of traveling, I haven't had one instance of personal hostility and I've probably had only half a dozen moments of intellectual hostility, where someone might say the United States is wrong, but it's not about me at all. Often the person will say something like, "Excuse me, my friend, I don't want to offend you, but your government is wrong."

This is not to say, go run around Saudi Arabia with an American flag on your back, but at the same time, go, stop in the Sudan and someone might offer you tea. I'm not so hopeful to think that I am going to necessarily change this sense of traveling, but I do think that the more people travel and think about the way they are traveling will change this.

One thing I love about traveling is what you learn when you go into it with the right perspective, a willingness to risk feeling uncomfortable and actually see aspects of a world that is different from the one you are used to living in. Suddenly you discover so many new influences -- music, food, art, sport, perhaps even a different emotion that you are unaccustomed to experiencing when you are caught up in the daily regimen of your life. I don't think you have to travel far to do this, but I think that it's sort of a given opportunity when you do. For example, I spent a few days in Slovenia this past summer. I had never even thought about the country Slovenia before, hardly had an inkling of where it was geographically in the world, until I saw this film at the International Film Festival in Athens, Ohio. The film was by a Slovenian director, Vojko Anzeljc, and influenced me to research the country, which I discovered to be this fascinating place, recently independent and full of natural beauty. I couldn't find a copy of the film anywhere here, and decided, therefore, that I should travel to Slovenia in search of it. Ironically, I sprained my ankle when I got there and was unable to find the time to look for the film, but ultimately that ended up not being the point. Rather, the film reminded me how little I know about the world. In my research I discovered a bunch of websites about the Slovenian film industry, their film festivals, other directors, actors, artists, projects, etc. Traveling is a good lesson for grounding yourself, if nothing else, and to be reminded exactly how diverse of a world we live in.

I've had similar experiences. There's this Iranian filmmaker that someone I was out with one night mentions and all the other people instantly know this person -- we aren't in some sort of erudite café. And I am sitting there thinking, who is this guy? Then I go and see one of his movies, and am like, wow, this guy has like seven movies, and there's a whole Iranian film industry that is highly revered among people who know film, and I had no idea until that point. And sometimes, they end up knowing more about American stuff than I do. I'll get an email about some funky Indie filmmaker from my Argentinean friend who has just seen this filmmaker's third movie, and I've never even heard of him. On some level, you start to feel ridiculous that you've never heard of these things before -- you think, how did I become a relatively well-educated, intelligent, well-read person, and not really know much about these things before?

That to me, is one of the most powerful reasons on a cultural level, to travel for Americans. I don't apologize for Americans or the "American tourist." I used to have this conversation with my Italian friends, and I'd say, "Look, you grow up in the middle of a country of 300 million people in a state like Indiana where all you here is English being spoken." I grew up in Pittsburgh, I never heard any other language being spoken until I was 18; I had no need to. I was living inside one of the world's super-powers; I didn't need to know who was president between Mussolini and Berlusconi. I'm not saying I chose not to know; the information or a reason to seek out this type of information was just never presented to me. My friends might bring up the argument, how can Americans be so rude or know so little, or whatever the case may be. My response is, (A) you're wrong -- of those 300 million people, many of them come from different countries, and a lot of them speak other languages so it's far more diverse than you give it credit for, and (B) second of all, those who don't are living in a very huge, monolithic culture, which it takes a lot to break through. The biggest value of travel is to be de-contextualized and stripped of all that baggage, sitting in somewhere like Ljubliana, hearing people speak Slovenian, and realizing that they might know more about your world than you do and you have only begun to ask about theirs.

Yeah, so you realize, again, that you are only starting to learn, but not to be scared of that.

Definitely, take it on.

Copyright 2005, Missy Raterman

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.