We present the second in a series of interviews that were conducted by Tom Sykes as part of the research for his upcoming book The Years of Travelling Anxiously, available from Icon Books on March 26. In today’s instalment, travel writer and author of Small Earthquakes, Shafik Meghji discusses how he’s dealt with anxieties that have arisen when travelling solo in challenging places from India to Syria to Latin America.
Editor’s note: This interview was conducted before the recent US travel restrictions came into effect.
Tom Sykes (TS): Over your many years of travelling have you developed resilience to situations that can cause anxiety?
Shafik Meghji (SM): I’ve been travelling for a long time and doing travel writing for fifteen-odd years. It’s an incredible profession, as you know. You have such a wide range of experiences in different parts of the world and in unusual situations with peoples or cultures or institutions that you might not have come across before. That builds up an experience bank and a bank of resolve. It helps you to deal with unpredictability and chance events and negative experiences.
Travel writing has definitely taught me to be more patient and to go with the flow, to use a cliche. Way back in time when I was backpacking in India and South America, before I started travel writing, I’d get frustrated or worried by train cancellations or delays, for example. Or later, when I was working on the Rough Guide to India, I had to travel halfway across the country in a very short space of time, from a police station in Hyderabad to a government office in Kolkata, just to get a visa issue rectified. I had to completely rearrange my schedule on the fly and deal with India’s famous bureaucracy, which is always a challenge.
Those experiences I’m not keen to repeat, but you learn that some things are out of your control and resisting this fact is not always helpful. You learn to be flexible and it’s like a muscle that you have to keep exercising. It’s about accepting that things aren’t always going to work out the way you expect. In fact, generally they won’t – sometimes good things happen, sometimes bad things happen. That’s travelling and that’s life.
TS: Early on, when that muscle was quite small and weak, were there any moments when you felt shocked or overawed?
SM: Definitely. I grew up in a family that loved holidays, loved to travel. My parents passed that down to my sister and I. The first ‘proper’ travel experience I had was backpacking around Southeast Asia just after university. At that early age I realised that I’d previously relied on my parents a lot. For the first time I had to think about insurance and passports and all of that kind of stuff. There were definitely moments of anxiety on those early trips. There was confusion and not knowing what to do in certain situations such as when travel connections collapse – the bus doesn’t turn up, you get off at the wrong stop on the train route.
When I first went to Delhi, I came across so many of the classic scams that you read about and I would later write about in the Rough Guide to India. These might be dodgy taxi drivers refusing to take you to your accommodation, claiming it is closed or has burned down, and then taking you somewhere else and trying to sell you it. I have Indian heritage on my father’s side but I only visited the country for the first time as an adult and it was the cliched culture shock. To use another cliche, it throws you in at the deep end and your first experience of it is not a lot of fun. But you get through it. You know what to look out for next time. You’re less likely to fall for those scams again. It was a really good learning experience. People often say that if you go to India for a week, you often don’t enjoy it. But if you go for two or three weeks, you fall in love with it.
It throws you but it also toughens you up. You get used to haggling. You get used to refusing to pay miscellaneous charges that have been added to your bill. You get used to being firm with potential scammers. You start to notice danger signs and you become more streetwise. You learn patience because Indian trains are a wonderful way to travel, but delays and cancellations happen all the time. India was a good place to travel early in my career. It made all of my subsequent travels easier. I also gained a love of the culture.
One of the most common questions I’m asked by people outside the travel industry is how do you cope with travelling on your own? What do you do for dinner? For me, going out and eating by myself is one of the great pleasures of life. But scrolling back 20 years, solo travel would have made me feel anxious. I don’t have a strong memory of it but I’m sure I was. An awful lot of people find being on their own, or being on their own in certain social situations, awkward and uncomfortable. Over time, I’ve learned to relish solo travel, much as I love travelling with other people and sharing my experiences. As a travel writer you come to accept that you will have a lot of time alone with your thoughts and that you’ll have to occupy yourself. I enjoy the independence, the freedom, the scope to set your own itinerary, to go where you want. Travelling solo encourages you to meet people because you’re easier to approach. You’re more likely to feel the urge to talk to your fellow travellers, to local people, and so on.
TS: If you’re travelling with a purpose does it make that time spent alone easier to handle? If you have to crack on with writing, does it give your trip structure and prevent anxiety?
SM: That’s a really good point. On my work trips there’s always a reason to talk to people and to do things and to keep focused. When I take holidays, I have to fight the urge to note down the average price of a main course in a restaurant. The writer’s brain is always ticking – everything is copy. Just going on holiday, not doing anything, trying to relax – this is what we prescribe to others in our guidebooks, but it’s actually quite difficult to do it ourselves. The other thing is that you often take pleasure in the smaller wins when you’re travelling. It’s a mundane example, but just getting laundry done can feel like a huge achievement if you’re backpacking, moving around constantly. 99% of travel is logistics, about negotiating somewhere that you’re unfamiliar with, where you don’t necessarily speak the language or know the customs. It’s figuring out how this part of society works or it’s what information I need so that I can do this task. Seeing this as a learning experience might be a way to avoid anxiety.
TS: You mentioned your Indian heritage. Have there been any moments when your identity has been a cause of stress or friction while travelling?
SM: Going through US customs is no fun for anyone, particularly if you’re a person of colour, mixed-race, Muslim and/or have a Muslim-sounding name, especially since 9/11. That situation has only got worse in recent years, thanks to the current political climate. I always expect hassle going through or to be delayed. I was once asked by a suspicious US customs officer if I was a Muslim. I jokily responded, ‘No, I’m worse than that, I’m an atheist.’ That landed me a long time of being questioned!
It’s not always necessarily because of my name that I draw suspicion. Travel writers have an unusual array of stamps in their passports. For many years I flew through Miami regularly to go down to Latin America, when I was working on m first book Crossed Off the Map. I had a lot of Bolivian, Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian stamps in my passport and outsiders often have negative stereotypes in mind about those countries. You get questions about why you are wanting to visit South America quite so often. Are you a drug runner? Things like that.
People of colour always get more hassle, not just in the US but in Europe and beyond. I haven’t been stopped and searched nearly as much other people I know, which I’m sure is for various reasons, not least having the privilege of a British passport. But as a person of colour you definitely feel that you’re stopped more often than the average white passenger who’s coming through at the same time. That’s been part of my whole life anyway. It’s not a surprise for me. If I got hung up on that stuff it would consume me. The flip side is that in other ways I’m more privileged than others. I’m a man, able-bodied, heterosexual and so on, so I get a lot less hassle on those levels.
There’s also sometimes an advantage to being a writer. If an immigration officer wants to be sure that I am who I say I am they can Google me, right? It’s a nice luxury to have. I was once stopped at immigration in the US on my way to Bolivia and I had lots of South America stamps. The guy looked closely at them and then asked me about how often I go and what I was going to see next. He said, ‘The salt flats are beautiful. Have you been during the rainy season when they turn into a giant mirror?’ That kind of friendliness has been the exception rather than the rule, though.
The one time that having a Muslim first name worked in my favour was in 2008 when my friend and I were getting the Taurus Express train from Istanbul to Aleppo. It was one of the world’s great train train rides – Agatha Christie wrote about it. The train was due to cross the Turkey-Syria border in the middle of nowhere in the Taurus Mountains. There’s no town, no real settlement there. The journey was supposed to take about 24 hours but we were significantly delayed. About an hour before we got to the border crossing, I realised that my visa, which I’d got from the embassy in London, wasn’t due to start until the following day! That was anxiety inducing.
When I got to the queue at immigration there were about twenty other tourists including Americans. It got to my turn and I handed the immigration officer my passport. He looked at it strangely, said something to me in Arabic. I replied in English, ‘Sorry, I’m afraid don’t speak Arabic.’ The guy replied in English, ‘Shafik, that is a common name in Turkey but it’s spelled differently.’ And then he just said, ‘Welcome to our country.’ He hadn’t bothered looking at the visa. ‘Come in,’ he said and waved me and my friend through. We had no hassles at all while, ironically, the American tourists who had valid visas were subjected to 20 minutes of questioning over why they might be visiting! So that’s one time when my particular heritage helped me through a potentially tough situation.
TS: It can be whimsical, can’t it? When I’ve overstayed on a visa I’ve either been fined or I’ve just been let through, no questions asked. Do you think the right attitude, being polite and staying cool and calm, helps officials to give you sympathy and let things slide?
SM: As a rule of thumb, getting angry or visibly frustrated in these situations, however you might feel inside, isn’t an effective tactic. Sometimes being able to speak the language helps. Sometimes not being able to – or pretending you can’t – can help. You have to rely on the experience you’ve banked. You might think this looks like a hairy situation but it’ll almost certainly work out in the end, even if I can’t quite see what the solution is at this point.
TS: When you have these encounters with officials who have the power to make your life easy or difficult, do you wonder whether they themselves are under pressure, whether they’re feeling stress and anxiety?
SM: Absolutely. Working on the immigration desk at an airport is my idea of hell, really. These people are often not very well paid. A lot of pressure is on them. It’s often a very mundane job. If you get into a tricky or perilous situation with them you cannot necessarily empathise, but you can try and put yourself into the shoes of the person on the other side of the desk, even if they’re being a pain in the neck for no apparent reason. You can try and understand what their potential motivations are. That might suggest a route out of the situation.
When I was researching my book I was in the Chapare region of Bolivia, which is one of the big coca growing regions. At various points over the last half a century, there’s been a large, and highly contentious, US Drug Enforcement Agency presence there. There’s been a lot of violence and organised crime there, and the local people, the ordinary people, have borne the brunt of it. Travelling in that region with a British passport, and certainly a US passport, can raise concerns. The last time I was there I had a driver and there were many checkpoints where you had to show your passport. You’re asked what you’re doing there and they search your luggage and put a mirror under the car to check if you’re transporting anything illegal. It’s a pain to go through, but I was forewarned and knew what to expect. I remember thinking of the police cadets who searched me that this is a horrible job for young people, barely out of their teens. Sometimes they were from the Andean areas, quite far away, and would have experienced a real culture shock. They’d come to an area where there’s been lots of violence and lots of hassle. I would have to remind myself of this if these guys were being rude or officious or difficult.
TS: Have you ever been in a situation where telling people that you’re a travel writer has generated any hostility or suspicion? Perhaps in places where there is a security concern or an authoritarian set-up where people might think that journalists are snoopers or troublemakers?
SM: In Latin America, if feels like there’s more respect for the profession of journalism. Maybe it’s undeserved respect, I don’t know. Syria and Turkey, on the other hand, both have poor press freedom records, so these were places where I didn’t say I was a journalist or a travel writer. I didn’t take my press card with me. Sometimes it’s better to describe yourself as a traveller rather than a journalist.
On a lighter note, I was pursued around a village in the Terai region of Nepal for the best part of a day, while I was doing research for Rough Guides. I was being harangued by people for not including their establishment in the Lonely Planet Guide to Nepal, even though, as I repeatedly explained, I didn’t work on that title!
TS: Have you ever been travelling somewhere when some crisis has happened that derailed your plans or made you have to seriously re-think your plans?
SM: I’ve been on research trips in Nepal and Chile during earthquakes. I was aware that people had died, which is the worst thing of course. On a much more minor level, I was forced to rearrange my schedule. I was also stuck in the Bolivian Amazon town of Rurrenabaque, a gateway to Madidi National Park, for the best part of a week. Torrential rain made the rudimentary airstrip impassable for planes. It was impossible to fly out, so that caused delays. I’ve been in Bolivia during major strikes and protests, so you would be unwise to visit the areas where these were happening. Sometimes roads had been cut off or public transport cancelled.
TS: Have there been any incidents that have stopped you doing your job as a travel writer?
SM: On some of my guidebook research trips I wasn’t able to visit certain places due to landslips that had put roads out of use. In the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia, I was doing research for both a guidebook and for my book Crossed Off the Map. There were major student protests and I had limited time in the city to get the information I needed. I was out one evening and heard gunfire going off. I saw the protestors being ‘dispersed’ by the police – people were running in all directions. Whatever plans I had for that day or for the next day, and indeed for that trip, would have to be curtailed.
At the same time, when something dramatic or difficult happens that’s copy, right? That’s an anecdote that you can use as a writer – not to treat serious issues lightly, of course. I was writing a book about Bolivia so that protest was a vivid example of what was going on socially and politically. I got a first-hand example of what it’s like to be at a protest, or to be a student or campaigning about human rights issues at that moment.
The key thing you’re doing as a writer is giving people an accurate – at least from your perspective – account of a destination. That’s not always positive. Lots of people will face hassles and difficulties and occasional dangers on their trips, and so if you can write about these from personal experience, it’s beneficial, it’s interesting, isn’t it?
TS: So when a problem does arise it might be useful for the kind of book that you’re trying to write, but probably a pain if you’re trying to promote that place or provide information that would encourage people to visit?
SM: I’m less concerned about the promotional aspect. My loyalty is to the reader, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious. I want to give an accurate account of the place. I don’t feel the need to sugarcoat or round off the rough edges of places because that’s not the reality. It may not necessarily be what the tourist board or a travel company wants to hear but it’s important for the reader to know.
More instalments to follow weekly through March in the lead-up to the release of The Years of Travelling Anxiously by Tom Sykes.
