Read All About It

People sometimes ask me about trip logistics and planning when I get back on one of these travel sprees, and while I've addressed that in general before, lately I've had folks ask how I plan for trips in a non-budgetary sense, and so I figured I'd blab here a second about That Process. After the jump: what I said I would do!

Being a big old dummy nerd who loves books so much why doesn't he marry them already, I of course go hard on reading up before I hit the road. This was true well before I started traveling at all, let alone as zanily as I have done these past six years (excepting Covid). Back in my accounts payables days, I'd spend lunch hour after lunch hour trawling budget travel sites, "careers abroad" portals, travel blogs, etc. At this point I had no real sense that it was possible, but even as a daydream, I usually started with words.

This is still the case, and I find that I tend to triangulate when it comes to reading up in advance of a trip. I start, of course, with guidebooks - those standby titles we all know - Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, Rick Steves, Moon, and so on. By now, I have my personal preferences but I'll usually skim all the guidebooks I can find for my destinations, with a relatively solid mental filter based on my experiences of each. 

What I like about the guides I mention above - when they live up to what they're capable of - is they tend to be fairly opinionated, unafraid to describe a town as "a soulless tourist trap" or a hotel as "cheap, poorly insulated, but central." Once you get a sense of what the author's predilections are - does this person love hammams or do they think we need to know all the best roller skating venues in Asia? - you can filter based on your own tastes. Arthur Frommer tells a great story about how his first guidebook author for Mexico hated Mexican food and wrote his guides with advice on how to find burgers in every town he covered. So, you know: read between the lines and salt accordingly.

My go-to example for this is Rick Steves, whose guidebooks are extremely useful tools when it comes to logistics and planning, but who absolutely loves churches and Renaissance art to a degree that I will never, ever mirror. (I refuse.) When Steves gives a church his top three-triangle rating, I note it as maybe worth checking out; once it drops to two or one, GOODBYE FOREVER! But he's admirably choosy, and if he's covered a destination, I'll usually keep him in the quiver. His books are great on logistics, good for historical context, and frequently updated, although his recommendations and tone are somewhat calibrated for an older and more suburban audience that (to his credit) he has to encourage to e.g. take public transit or walk.

Lonely Planet has moved on somewhat from the shoestring backpacking ethos with which it started, but still focuses a bit more on experiential listings than some of the other guides; I'll usually skim them with an eye on tour listings, cooking/art classes, concert venues, trekking outings, and things of that nature. I haven't found them to be very good on historical context in a while, and I sometimes find their "let's make sure we have a listing for just about any town a tourist might want to wander into" scope leaves their books a little light on depth. They went through some miserable ownership changes in the very "media landscape is full of awful people with money" sense which made their work very not-good for a while; my sense is that they continue to take a "what if we pay a handful of people absolute garbage to check listings from three editions back and lose any sense of authorial voice" approach, though I hope this has ceased to be the case. I am curious to see how their books handle the post-pandemic landscape, which poses all these series a challenging opportunity to rethink and overhaul their guides.

Rough Guides might be my Goldilocks option of the big three. Their writing is nicely researched, concise but informative, and a bit trad without losing sight of the contemporary happenings of the cities and towns they cover. Less hand-holding than Rick Steves (though sometimes I do like having a suggested walking tour laid out for me!) but still interested in educating their readers. Both this and Lonely Planet are usually written by teams at this point - but I think RG does a better job of letting their authors voice opinions and chase their fascinations.

Moon is a more recent favorite addition, largely because it possesses authorial voice to a degree you don't much find outside of Rick Steves; this may be about the audiences they are chasing, but I think the fact that Moon tends to use expat residents as authors helps them quite a bit in this regard. Their cultural (music, theatre, etc.) and food listings tend to be very strong in pointing you toward actual hubs of local activity among The Youths (for the purpose of this paragraph pretend that I am also A Youth).

Even Moon's listings, though, aren't exclusively or even primarily where I go for listings when it comes to food or entertainment. (Again: location by location this will differ, as authorial preferences will color the listings.) Instead, I tend to look for more localized and recent listings - not Tripadvisor/Google/Yelp (though I'll glance at photos for a sense of vibe) but articles in media publications, posts on reputable foodie blogs, etc. (For instance, Culinary Backstreets, whose Lisbon food tour remains one of my favorite cultural educations in Europe, runs regular articles exploring the cities in which they have a presence, focusing on independently owned and operated places whose appeal is unique and of high value.)

Because I'm me - and this is easily replicable in anybody's corners of interest - I'll also do some digging to see what theatre might be around in the cities I'm visiting, any ceramic artists or studios that look promising, and anything else that might spark with my fleeting obsessions. (I am not wild about the idea of the steam heat of Japan in the summer, but I am absolutely making it back for a baseball game, for instance.)

The goal in all of this research is not to make an itinerary. One of the reasons I like to move slowly (ideally about a week at a time in each place that I visit) is that it allows me to make up my mind each day about what I feel like doing, rarely putting more than one activity or destination on the menu each morning. As I research, I gradually cobble together massive maps of pins color-coded to activities, destinations, coffee shops / bars, restaurants, shops, etc., and then once I'm in situ, I set off on daily wanders. Particularly in these summer trips, where a morning outing is usually chased by early-afternoon heat-avoiding work back at home, it's a nice pace, and when I move slowly enough and have done my research in advance, it helps me avoid the twin danger-poles of overpacking a trip with to-do lists and landing in a lethargic fugue state that feels like a real waste of Naples, or wherever.

All this said, my favorite reading prep for travel is not even remotely logistical, unless (as I suppose you should) you consider cultural fluency to be a logistical advantage. What I love, more than anything, is finding writing that gives me a window into the culture in some way. Sometimes this is fiction: reading Independent People, the totemic Icelandic novel whose author won the Nobel prize, offers a profound insight into the stark challenges of living in that inhospitable and unearthly landscape whether you're reading it on site or prior to arrival; reading The Leopard before heading to Sicily can give you a fantastic sense of the geography and history that you'll be passing through; reading Patricia Highsmith or John Le Carre is.... just plain fun, albeit more "armchair travel" than "giving you a glimpse into the psyche of a place and its people." Sometimes it's worth seeking out well-researched-and-reported nonfiction, although I'll admit that I'm not terribly fond of your "Ancient Greece: An Historie In Twelve Parttes" volumes, and am more easily taken by targeted slices (usually focused on more recent culture or history).

On this trip, I found The Passenger: Greece invaluable in this regard. Part of a series of, essentially, literary anthologies focused on global destinations, it consists of a series of longform nonfiction essays on various aspects of modern Greece (the refugee crisis, the debt crisis, the disappearance of the traditional taverna, the emergence of a new Greek cinema, etc) as well as some short fiction and recommendations of other pieces of writing to seek out. I wouldn't have begun to understand the nuances of life on Lesvos without the depth and familiarity of this collection's writing on the subject, however mindful a guidebook author might be in providing that context. It also helps open doors - I've had numerous conversations here where my extremely "Oh, the New Yorker had an article about that from which I remember two facts" style knowledge of major concerns in recent Greek history let me get deep into conversations around the country's relationship to the EU, the ways that the military junta years still resonate in modern Athens, and so on.

It's very boring to say, but the more you know before arriving - even if some of it feels hazy or a bit confusing without on-the-ground context - the richer your experience is. This isn't all down to reading, of course - I love getting to dig in on Lanthimos' Greek films before bouncing over here, or Paolo Sorrentino's wild cinema of Italian excess before hopping back to Italy, and it's tremendously fun to throw together playlists of classical and contemporary music from the countries I'm rambling off to. But, you know, old habits die hard, and particularly after they sustained me through the desert of Covid isolation, reading as a preparation - or substitute - for travel is something I think I'll love for a good long age yet to come.