Liz just wrote about the view from the Langham, Melbourne, where I also stayed this past Spring.  It reminded me of something that happened to me on that visit.

I am in no way a morning person, but my body never quite accommodated to Australian time. I was routinely up before sunrise. One morning, I threw back the curtains on the day to admire the skyline and…what was this? In the gray pre-dawn sky, I observed three gray flying objects — apparently bearing down on the city.

Occasionally they changed color, flaring orange. I rubbed my eyes, blinked a few times.

The flying objects were still there. Was I dreaming? I going crazy? Was Melbourne under some sort of attack? I got my camera, perhaps to document the end of this lovely city, but more sensibly to use the zoom lens as makeshift binoculars.

Aha, hot air balloons.

Darrin DuFord started his traveling life when he co-founded the band Motor Betty. He’s since become a travel writer, and although his curiosities lead him in many different directions, he often finds a way to work music into his travels. That’s what happened in his latest Perceptive Travel story,  A Dialog of Echoes in Uruguay.

He’s the author of Is There a Hole in the Boat? Tales of Travel Without a Car in Panama, and a contributor to Transitions Abroad, GoNOMAD, Perceptive Travel, Travel Channel’s World Hum, and McSweeney’s, among others. He lives in Queens.

Alison Stein Wellner: What made you decide to go to Uruguay?

Darrin DuFord: I planned to go to Uruguay to research their native meats — like nutria, which is a rodent.  When I was getting ready to go, I kept noticing references to candombe, a style of drumming in Uruguay. My old passion for drumming took over, and I thought, I’m first going to write about that. So I kept researching candombe, and put the nutria idea on hold.  I hooked up with a candombe teache there, and arranged a lesson.

ASW: What sort of research did you do?

DD: I ordered some music CDS from some artists from Uruguay,  and I read some of the liner notes — that helped out. I also went back and forth with my drum teacher on email.

ASW: How did you handle note-taking?  You’ve got such great details in this story, but you’re also holding a drum a lot of the time, which seem like it would make it hard to hold a notebook!

DD: It’s a process I keep on honing every time I travel.  I have small notepad with me, I don’t bring a laptop — I’m old school analogue, so I’ve got my pen and paper,  but it’s dark outside on the street, so I’m just getting lost in the sensory experience. Once I get back to the hotel, I write it all down.

“I followed the sounds of the drums ricocheting off the houses. The walls seemed alive, responding to the drums in perfect time. As a percussionist, I caught a naughty thrill hearing the irresistibly sweet—and often forbidden—marriage of drums and street acoustics. That was when I noticed Pocitos—this residential neighborhood—was noticeably well kept. I thought of David Byrne’s ruminations in his Bicycle Diaries  concerning the usual correlation between a neighborhood’s affordability and its tolerance for eccentricity. I wished he could have joined us, bike and all.” – From A Dialog of Echoes in Uruguay.

ASW: No laptop, wow.

DD: I often get criticized about not bringing a laptop with me — but I’ve never brought laptop with me, I’m afraid of getting it lost or stolen or some stupid thing. With a notepad, it’s just a stupid crappy notepad. I do prefer Moleskines. I also like hotel pens, although usually when I travel I stay at places not fancy enough to give you a pen in the room. So I “borrow” a pen from reception — a permanent loan. I also bring at least three or four pens from home, but I say it’s always nice to have a fresh pen waiting for you. At reception.

ASW [who would never criticize]: And you also take photos, do you consider that research too?

DD: Yes, in fact it’s faster to take a photo than it is to write something down. Some of my photos are not meant for Flickr, they’re ugly. I take them to save an image, so that when I look at them again, I jog my memory. I do that when it would take too long to whip out notebook.

ASW: So how did you decide on the shape of the story? I really liked how you drew a connection between the drumming and the street murals, the cars left to rust.

DD: That’s something that slowly grew as I was walking through the city. When I was there, I kept asking myself these questions — how can this city not only permit all this drumming in the streets, but why do they encourage it? Here in New York City, if you did that, the cops would come by and shut you up. So I wondered: why is this possible?  To get that answer, it took more than just watching the drummers, I thought, let’s see what’s going on in the culture of the city, what do they value? I took in the old cars, the murals — which say a lot about the artistic slant of the residents. It was a big picture way of explaining to me why they value street drumming.  Anyway, that was the only way that I could tell it –  to dig deep into the ethos of the city.

“Next morning: still coughing up essence of burning bourgeois chair leg. Someone was painting a mural on the façade of an art foundation across my hotel. I had already started a collection of mural photos from previous walks in Montevideo—Batman with a bare, protruding gut; Jesus in tighty–whities; fish with opposable thumbs. The streets were speaking. I kept listening.

I wondered what statement the rusty Studebakers and Morrises along the curb were making. Despite contributing to the city’s sooty air, the cars must have been tickling a particular aesthetic fancy. Some were junked, and were somehow entitled to parking spots as their final resting places, where they oxidized in peace: a charming respect for the elderly. It was as if removing them would be an act of vandalism.” – From A Dialog of Echoes in Uruguay.

ASW: How did you go about writing your story after you finished research?

DD: I only had a few notes in my trusty paper notepad, and once I came back,  I turned those notes into sentences on my computer. This was the first story I wrote after I typed up my notes from the whole trip.

ASW: You type up your notes as soon as you get home? That makes me feel really guilty. I know I should do that, but I never do.

DD: Yes, I type them up. I’m afraid I might lose the notebook.And when you have to type your notes, it does jog your memory  — it is a good exercise for recalling what happened.

[Pause while ASW realizes she quite agrees with this, and considers changing her ways -- but then remembers she is Conducting an Interview; this is not about her, really -- and gets back to it.]

ASW: Okay, so you type up your notes, and then what?

DD: I look at my notes and I look at my pictures, with a little help from space music which puts me in the mode.

ASW: Space music?

DD: Yeah, like Tangerine Dream, Steve Roach. It’s good for putting your mind into the thought mode.

ASW: And where do you write?

DD: Usually at my desk, although sometimes I sit on the floor, sometimes I kneel, and  sometimes I stand, so my body will stay happy with me. I’m always in front of a desk or a computer. I have a regular desktop PC, and I have a MacBook. Right now I’m sitting on the floor cross-legged sitting next to a coffee table.

ASW: I was wondering where you were on computers, since there is maybe a slight anti-technology theme? As you said, you don’t carry a laptop, and in the piece you do make a comment about iPhones: “Many Americans, for example, have become “accustomed” to their families and friends hunching over iPhones at the dinner table.”

DD: I wouldn’t call myself anti-technology, because it has a place. If I didn’t have a computer, it would have taken me a long time to type out my piece on an old fashioned typewriter. It’s a tool to get things done faster, it’s why I’m on Twitter and Facebook. But for some people, it just seems to take over their life. It was funny thing, I saw comedian doing an act when the iPad came out, and he said, people were given a choice — to get an iPad or a life. And they all chose an iPad. That’s kind of my philosophy on technology. It seems to be destroying the natural social environment for family and friends.

ASW: So I’ve got to know if you ever got back to the nutria story.

DD: Yes, I had time to research the meats as well. I’m getting to that story now, in fact.

ASW: Any advice for travel writers?

DD: As far as narrative travel writing goes, it’s a matter of honing one’s story telling skills. I would say, I usually get inspired when I read my favorite authors, whether its nonfiction or fiction.  David Byrne’s book the Bicycle Diaries — I mentioned that in the story, in fact, that was the book that I read right when I came back. That certainly cast a new light on travel writing, he’s a musician and he’s writing a travelogue book — that helped me see travel writing in a new way. Other travel writers that I like are  Rolf Potts, Bill Bryson, the Travelers’ Tales “Best of” books. For fiction, it’s anyone from Nabakov to Jonathan Lethem.

Bizarro World was a planet conceived of by DC comics in the 1960s  — it was a cube-shaped planet known as Htrae, or Earth, backwards, and everything there was an opposite, or in some way slanted version of what happened here on our blue marble patrolled by Superman.

I don’t mean any insult when I say that Canada has always struck me as Bizarro World – it feels so familiar, but everything is a few ticks different. Canada and the United States share so much in the way of ingredients – influenced by the British, the French, similar tribes of Native Americans, similar geology, topography, flora and fauna…I suppose this is why some people call it the 51^st state.

But it’s not, of course, and just as can make a number of different dishes from the same set of ingredients, our differences are significant. Cross into Canada, and you immediately notice the trivial changes: the bills have become coins, the coins are called “loonies” and everything is in metric.

The border is more than mere cartography.

The writer Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940, to Canadian parents. He grew up shuttling back and forth across the border, and wrote about that time in an essay called “Memories of Unhousement”, which I just read in The Pushcart Book of Essays.

Blaise tackles what was the primary cultural divide in Canada historically — between the French speakers and the English speakers,  a subject that was particularly inflamed during the Trudeau administration.

“In Toronto, I have heard the familiar retort “Speak White!”.  I’ve seen my (one time) fellow Torontonians demand of young Québec tourists chattering away on the immaculate Toronto subway to please remember where they are; that so much jabbering in French is giving everyone a headache…On Prince Edward Island, in a tourist home modelled on Anne of Green Gables, the landlady, in showing us our rooms and remarking on my Québec license plates (but not on my French name) confided in me, “the white man built this country! What are the French trying to do?”

The great thing about visiting Bizarro World is that it lets your see own world with more clarity. I mean, doesn’t it seem strange, from a modern U.S. perspective, that someone would be considered “non-White” by virtue of language?

It does indeed, because  race is an entirely imaginary and flexible concept. (At various times in US history, many people who would solidly be considered “white” today — Italians, Greeks,  for instance — were considered non-white.)  “Race, as a meaningful criteria within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be fiction,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or the “Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers, and more generally, in metaphors.”

We humans do tend to put great stock in these entirely imaginary differences, with quite real and often sickening consequences. And we, here in the United States, are now in the midst of a defining race by virtue of mother tongue — only we’re talking about people who speak Spanish and who hail from below that other border, to our South.

The old man and old woman sitting next to me were having a fight.

Or so I surmised. I was on a flight from Shenzhen to Beijing. I was in the aisle seat and the old Chinese couple, in neat but well-worn clothing, occupied center and window.

It was generalized pandemonium upon boarding, with the flight attendants running to and fro, and business men talking simultaneously into three or four cell phones, and what seemed like a lot of unnecessary shouting. The flight attendants were uncommonly short – I saw one giving another a boost in order to shut the overheads.

Soon after take-off, the couple started speaking to one another in harsh tones. Although I understand no Chinese, this did not seem a case of one scolding the other –  judging from the self-righteous tone they both employed, they equally believed they were in the right.

However, when the food arrived, the fight was abandoned. They tucked into the food, including something glutinous and fluorescent pink which I tentatively poked at with my fork for a while. When they were done, the woman rummaged in the seat pocket, pulled out the barf bag and neatly packaged up the leftovers.  She opened her newspaper with satisfaction, her left elbow hovering in the space about three inches from my seat belt, and although I squirmed and coughed pointedly, none of my subtle hints encouraged her to retreat to her own space. I lived with her elbow until she finished the paper and handed it to her husband.

Later, I realized that they weren’t having a fight at all.

Chinese is a tonal language, and Cantonese in particular can sound quite harsh to the Western ear. It can sound like fighting even when someone’s actually saying, hey, what did you hear about the weather in Beijing? I was ready to categorize what I heard from my seatmates as fighting, though, because I needed to put things into categories that I understood at that particular moment.

I’d spent a number of days in Hong Kong, but had taken the ferry to Shenzhen to fly to Beijing since the fare was cheaper. Although Hong Kong is now officially part of the People’s Republic, I did not feel like I was actually in China until I disembarked in Shenzhen, and headed for the quite modern airport that was certainly not international. There were aquariums filled with beautiful tropical fish, but I could not find a western style toilet seat, nor could I buy a snack, since I only had Hong Kong dollars and not People’s Republic RMB, and the vendors did not take credit cards and I could not find an ATM.

Anyway, as that China Southern flight took off for Beijing, I thought to myself something that I often think when I’m entering into a place that feels hard to parse: “You’re really in it now.”

What I really should tell myself in such instances: treat any conclusion you draw right now as highly suspect.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on the ground at JFK airport, in the first row of economy seats on a Royal Air Maroc flight to Casablanca. We were delayed for some time, and the in-flight crew were non-communicative as to what was causing the delay. Royal Air Maroc essentially operates without a functioning website, so there were no updates I could call up on my BlackBerry. But I was sufficiently distracted by watching some of the hubbub as my fellow passengers tried to find their seats.

What I was hearing, I realized, was an accent that sounded…Jamaican. Huh, Jamaican, I thought, how weird. Then I noticed that some of the passengers had dreadlocks, and certainly seemed to plausibly be from Jamaica.

What was happening here?

I considered the possibility that Moroccan simply sounded Jamaican to my ears, but that didn’t seem right. Or could there be some heretofore unknown connection between Morocco and Jamaica? I imagined writing about that, breaking the story, with some delight.  Then, I noticed that there were a number of teenagers rushing forward into First Class and then back again, all a-giggle and waving iPhones triumphantly. I peeked forward, and saw the flight crew posing for pictures with one of the First Class passengers. One of the teenagers settled herself into the seat across the aisle from me,  so I tapped her on the shoulder and asked who it was that was causing such a fuss. “Sean Paul,” she said, with a blushing smile. “Excuse me?” “Sean Paul,” she said firmly. I thanked her and used my BlackBerry to ascertain who this person was. A big whoop Jamaican reggae star, in case you also don’t know.

That explained a lot.

I often imagine what would happen if I didn’t find out that Sean Paul was aboard that flight, if I had decided to simply believe that I’d uncovered a new era of Jamaicans taking their holidays in Morocco…I could have told that story over drinks in Marrakesh, regaled people with “…and you’ll never believe!” when I returned to New York.

Also, it would have tempting, had I been writing a story about the Shenzhen airport from the airport, to advise ladies who would prefer not to deal with a squatter to hold it in until they boarded the plane –  but I happened to spot a western-style toilet seat lurking behind an ajar door on a bathroom flagged with a handicapped sign and so I overwrote my first observation, that there were no toilet seats to be found in Shenzhen airport, with better information.

The problem with traveling in a place that’s unfamiliar is that we’re so often entirely clueless about what’s actually happening – but we don’t realize how lost we are.

Of course, it’s a human tendency to interpret our observations of the current moment through the lens of our past experience, a lens whose glass was milled through experiences formed by our own culture. I don’t think this is a problem, necessarily, I think it’s something we have to do in order to function. The problem only comes when we cling to our initial interpretations tightly, when we’re unaware that we’re squinting through a distorting lens.

I think of that old Chinese couple often —  in fact, that’s one of the stories when I’m describing my confusion during what was my first trip to China – isn’t it funny that they were just having a conversation, and I thought they were having a spat?

But here’s the thing I realize now: they could have been fighting. After all, I don’t speak Chinese.

I really have no idea.

Richard Arghiris has one of those stories that will make adventurous small children want to be travel writers when they grow up.  Born in the UK, he recently packed up shop in London and has relocated to Central America to write (and also to relax, although he sounds pretty busy to me). He’s written for newspapers like the Independent and the Observer, and he’s also co-author of a number of Footprint guides, to Mexico and Nicaragua, among others.

He was updating his Nicaragua book when I contacted him to chat about his remarkable Perceptive Travel story, A Requiem for Bluefields, Nicaragua, so we talked via email.

Alison Stein Wellner: I typically start out by asking how a writer came across their story, and what made him/her decide to write it. It seems clear since you’re writing a guidebook and now live in Nicaragua that you’re doing extensive in-country research. What made this particular story about Bluefields stand out as one you wanted to tell? Was there one particular encounter, or was it something that gradually crept on you over time?

Richard Arghiris: I spent over a month in Bluefields with my partner, Jennifer Kennedy, whilst we interviewed over a dozen people about Law 445, also known as the Demarcation Law. The idea was to self-publish a series of articles and videos about the political changes occurring on Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast, specifically those affecting the land tenure and human rights of the region’s Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples. By the time we’d finished travelling around and talking to people, I had several ideas for potential articles, one of which was a piece about Bluefields.

I have to admit, initially, I was not particularly keen on the city. But as time went on and I got to know it better, it started getting intriguing, in a dark sort of way. I quickly realised that Bluefields would make the subject of an interesting desintation piece, albeit a visceral and alternative one, that perhaps conveyed some of our research into the region’s political background too. It seemed an appropriate idea for Perceptive Travel.

ASW: I’m intrigued by what you’ve said about not being so keen on the place. I’ve found in my own writing that the places I’ve liked the least, personally, are the places I’ve been able to write about the most. (So in a perverse way, I enjoy being unhappy in a place.) Have you found this in your work before?

RA: Yes, I have often written about places I don’t like, as well as negative experiences, although I’m not sure why I focus on those things more than ‘nice’ stuff. Partly, I find it difficult to write convincingly about joyous or beautiful things. Partly, I think, it’s a matter of what’s compelling. Unpleasant places may be uncomfortable to visit, but from a writer’s perspective they’re rich in material.

Take the Mexican border-town of Ciudad Juarez, for example. Ciudad Juarez is the infamous murder capital of Mexico, epi-centre of an escalting drugs war and a squalid dump by most accounts. It draws the worst of all worlds and has very little to offer in the way of charm. Its a quintessential border-town. Ugly, threatening, dark. Now I’m not suggesting anyone should visit the place for pleasure, but if you’re looking for exciting material, somewhere ‘interesting’, somewhere challenging, then it’s going to be a rewarding destination on some perverse level. Ultimately, you can suffer a great amount of pain if you’re onto a good story.

“The port was delirious with activity. Beyond a warren of dank brick alleys where consumptive sailors sweat out their sins, gangs of inebriated fishermen shared cigarettes and bantered. A ripe aroma of rotten fruit, diesel, dead fish, and grease suffused the air. A procession of weathered vessels bobbed past concrete piers where laborers loaded and unloaded supplies. A confused volley of orders, enquiries and insults flew back and forth like a flock of deranged sea–gulls.” – From A Requiem for Bluefields.

ASW: Your story struck me as an “anti-travel piece”, in that the destination doesn’t seem incredibly appealing. This is its own genre, of course — I’m thinking of this Magic Mountain piece in Harper’s. As you approached the piece, was this something you worried about — were you ever tempted to “nice it up” some?

RA: In the interests of balance and variety, I tried to pepper it with other flavours, but not too much. Nothing is ever a single shade of misery. Fortunately, Perceptive Travel is an open-minded and alternative outlet, so ultimately I didn’t need to worry too much about the audience feeling comfortable. The piece was not obliged to be ‘nice’.

Although I object slightly to the ‘anti-travel’ label, I get the point about ‘destination appeal’. There is an argument to be made that the real ‘anti-travel’ camp lies squarely in the mainstream. Travel journalism, on the whole, averts its gaze from the realities of the world. In fact, for the sake of sales, it positively denies them. It’s a sad truth that the genre is now little more than glorified advertising for the tourism industry. It has more in common with copy-writing than journalism, and historically, this was not always the case. Once upon a time, travel journalists reported realities, rather than sold destinations. Third world poverty is ‘not nice’, but it is a reality, and a very visible reality for anyone who travels in any one of the world’s impoverished nations. Why aren’t travel journalists reporting it more? The answer is obvious and two-fold. Editors don’t want to publish it. People don’t want to read it. That’s fine, but I can’t pretend the situation is very nice when I can see very well that it’s not.

ASW: I take your point, and quite agree that it’s a shame that the typical travel writer’s lens is often narrow and distorted. But building on this, do you also feel that travelers (not just writers) should go and see these places for themselves? There’s an argument to be made in favor of that, but then you do get into some of the voyeuristic
concerns of  so-called “dark tourism” — I’m thinking now particularly of the controversies surrounding slum tours in Mumbai, the favela tours in Rio.

RA: I don’t think it’s necessary for travellers to actively seek out dark and dangerous places (unless they feel particularly inclined), but when confronted with a difficult or disturbing scene, they should not look the other way. That is, they should not censor uncomfortable realities. Full awareness of the good, the bad and the ugly is what’s needed if we’re to understand anything. Ignoring life’s shadow side is about as clever as a full frontal lobotomy.

All that said, I think that most travellers are out to expand their awareness anyway. Otherwise, why travel?

I did not know people were running slum tours, but it doesn’t surprise me. Whether or not these are a good thing probably depends on the conduct of the operator. There’s no reason why slum tours can’t be ethical, enlightening and helpful to the communities that participate. It doesn’t have to be tasteless and voyeuristic.

The main thing, I think, is to emphasise the human aspect, rather than the photo opportunity. There’s nothing negative or controversial about rural community tourism, for example, which involves immersion in impoverished and underprivileged farming communities. People often come away from such tours with a new-found gratitude and humility. Some even report powerful life-changing experiences. Why can’t slum tours be positive too? After all, poverty is not a crime.

“Wherever I went, there was a palpable sense of loss—not of material riches, but of culture. Since the 1990s, an ever–advancing migratory tide has been eroding the coast’s fragile ethnic fabric. The ancient Rama language, now spoken by a mere handful of elders, is close to total extinction. The Creoles, once Bluefields’ most populous group, are now marginalised and impoverished.”Them mestizos is taking over our land.” An angry community leader, Merryl Campbell, had informed me one morning in a smoky cafe. “If we not careful, sometime soon, Bluefields ain’t gonna be called Bluefields no more. It gonna have some Spanish name, name after some Spanish hero, their hero. You know what is Bluefields?” He said defiantly. “Cotten Tree, Beholden, Old Bank, Pointeen—That’s Bluefields!” – From A Requiem for Bluefields

ASW: Are you able to discuss what other articles or projects may come from your Bluefields research?

RA: I’ve now blogged a few pieces about the Caribbean Coast, including some interviews with people who are either technically or politically involved in the demarcation process. It might all be a bit specific for a general audience, but perhaps useful for anyone who has an interest in indigenous rights. Beyond that, everything’s speculative, although I’ve been trying to get more travel pieces placed with websites and printed publications.

(To see some of the blogged articles, log onto Interamericana and scroll through the features in the banner. Some other Caribbean Coast pieces are also listed underneath it.)

ASW: When and where did you actually write the piece? Did you start to write it when you were in Bluefields? And where, physically, do you write generally?

RA: I wrote this piece sitting at a table in my house in Leon, northwestern Nicaragua. I usually share the house with 8-10 other people, so my work-space doubles up as a dining space. I’m basically nomadic, so I set up my work desk wherever I can. I would like to have a dedicated office but for that I would need a dedicated home somewhere. This is not likely any time soon as I am moving south to Panama soon, and then, afterwards, who knows where. Thank god for laptops.