Feature photo by davitydave.

Pauline Frommer might be The First Daughter Of Budget Travel, having grown up around her father’s guidebook dynasty. She is currently the editor of her own series (The Pauline Frommer’s Guides), a CNN travel regular and voices a weekly radio show, which she co-hosts with her dad, Arthur.

As I recall, you’ve just spent quite a time researching Las Vegas. How much time have you spent there?

I was there for about a month. I spent two months there for the first edition of my book and I was updating it. The problem with Vegas is that it changes every minute. Especially in this current economic crisis. Prices there are plummeting, mostly because the city has lost about a quarter of the flights that used to serve it.

I can see how it would be hard hit. In 2009, what happens to the five star hotel that relied on steady flow of $500 a night, rack-rate clients?

They are very, very quietly discounting. If you go to their websites they will still quote you that $500 per night rate. If you go through a discounter, you’ll find that you get them for $150 or $200 per night.

The truth is that every part of the travel industry – budget and luxury – is in huge trouble right now. I think that the luxury operators are trying desperately to hold onto their pricing, hoping that some suckers won’t recognize that things have changed.

You seem intent on helping people be at home in new places, whether it be a apartment rental vs hotel, or a neighborhood restaurant versus a bistro with three forks and four knives per place setting. How did that end up becoming a mission for you?

My father and I have always approached travel politically, in a certain way. We both believe that we wouldn’t be electing the leaders that we do if we were a better-traveled people.

I know that there are much more helpful things I could be doing but within travel, I would never do luxury because I love to open doors for people who think those doors are closed to them. That’s part of it.

The other part is that I think the best experience one has when one is traveling is meeting actual folks in the places that you’re going to, rather than just the concierge at your hotel.

Photo above by Caitlinator.

I love a term that I read amongst your writing. “Complain Effectively.” What kind of things do people do incorrectly when trying to sort out a dicey situation?

Nobody gets anywhere by screaming and shouting. You have to ask very calmly to speak with someone who actually has power – usually that’s not the person right in front of you. You catch more flies with honey, as they say.

People have created careers around travel problems. They make it sound if it’s incredibly important if you are delayed, that you make sure that you get on the next plane out. That might give you a little bit more vacation but you also might take years off of your life with the stress you are causing to your heart, by screaming at the person, “I have my rights!”

Sometimes things are going to go wrong. That’s the nature of travel. Travel is about exploration. It’s not about what your rights are, in my mind. I think that it’s an ugly way to approach travel.

It was fascinating to watch print guidebooks try to integrate a web component. Frommer’s was one of the first to really start digging into how this might be done. As the founding editor of that site, can you tell me a bit what that was like to figure it all out?

There was no blueprint whatsoever. We really were trying all kinds of things. It was a very exciting time. It felt like the gold rush and the immediacy of being able to talk to readers, to hear directly what their questions were.

I would spend 90 minutes a day just answering emails and giving travel advice. I still go onto the Frommers.com message boards and answer questions for people because I find it incredibly helpful to see what the questions are.

With print, a trusted name generally leads you to solid reviews and information. Online, you might be getting a cloak and dagger review from a hotel manager. How can you spot good advice on the internet?

My father keeps posting blogs about how you have to be careful with user-generated reviews. Everybody writes back, “I can tell when they’re fixed.” I don’t think you can. There are people hired by these hotels – it’s called ‘buzz marketing.’ They understand that a great review on Tripadvisor leads to a huge uptake in business. I think it’s important to read the trusted names.

Yes, you can look at Tripadvisor and the like. They can be helpful with trips like if there is construction nearby, but I think you really need to take it with a grain of salt.

Photo by digitaljournal.com.

I have friends that can’t find a bathroom without locating it on their iPhone first. Everything seems to be moving between two fingers…where do you think travel print will be in five years?

I think print will all be online, probably. It just seems to be going in that direction. As a web editor it was very interesting to learn how to edit on the web.

A lot of it was about how difficult it is to read things online – it’s just hard on the eyes. So you had to write in a different way, you really had to nugget-ize the information. I became very conscious of where I placed photos and things like that.

I think that those concerns seem to be going away with this next wave of technology. The Kindle is very easy on the eyes…as the technology gets better for reading these things, I think that paper books may go the way of the dodo bird.

You have two kids under ten…what did you learn from your parents about traveling with children?

If you talk to my father about traveling with children he will give you one word; ‘don’t.’ He thinks it’s a waste of time and money.

I do not. I think what I’ve learned is that you try to make things fun, that as they get older you integrate them into the planning of the trip, so that they have some kind of feeling of ownership, so that it’s not just something that is happening to them, that they have a say.

You’ve got to be willing to take some time off from the usual tourist things and just go sit in the park. I have to say, that can be the most fun part of the vacation because you meet local parents.

You’ve seen your share of must-go destinations come and go over the years. Is there one place that has stayed tried and true for you?

I think that a lot of travel writers have this idea that if it’s not discovered, it’s not worth going to anymore. I think that there is a reason that certain destinations – like Paris, New York, The Grand Canyon – are on the perennial must-do list. It’s because they have incredible riches and wonders.

Yes, you might have to see them in a crowd of tourists…but quite honestly, the must-go-to’s haven’t changed that much in the past 20 years.

Maarten Troost is the author of three books, all of them poignant and hilarious. Fans of his work know him as wry, witty and a little touched.

Troost’s latest, Lost on Planet China or How I Learned to Love Live Squid,
is a fantastic primer of a country that seems to ride a fine line between brilliance and absolute madness.

Photo by Steve Webel

Your two previous books (The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific
and Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu) have been written about periods of time when you’ve lived elsewhere. Lost on Planet China is about one trip, yet seems to pack more action per page. Is this just because China is so goddamned big and crowded?

Or it could be because more so than the first two books, which were about living in faraway places and kind of reflective and essay-ish, the China book follows the well-established conventions of the travel genre, where the movement of the author is the little engine that propels the book onward.

In the first two books I could linger for an entire chapter on something small – like the cannibalism that befell the canine community on the island of Tarawa, for instance – and use that to make some kind of larger point about the hardships of atoll-living.

In Lost on Planet China I felt compelled to keep things humming along, partly because as you noted China is indeed a big-ass country and to write a somewhat comprehensive book about it while trying to keep it – the book – at a manageable size necessitated a zippy pace.

Once I decided to write this book in a travel genre kind of way, the action-per-page factor was sort of preordained, if that makes sense.

Keeping notes in a communist country that doesn’t enjoy scrutiny would give me The Willies. Did you ever worry about being found out?

One thing that China does exceptionally well is that it has an uncanny ability to make individuals feel really, really small. I felt like a tick on a dragon in China.

Photo bychicchun

Everything about the country – its immensity, its enormous population, its architecture, its history – has a way of reducing an individual to near insignificance.

So I felt pretty free whipping out the old notebook whenever I encountered a noteworthy experience. Indeed, people were often drawn to watch as I scribbled what for them were the inscrutable lines and jots that constitute our letters. It was strangely gratifying knowing that my writing was as mystifying to them as their calligraphy was to me.

I learned quite a bit about spitting from your book. Could you explain to the novice just how much of it goes on in China?

Photo by zamario

No place on earth celebrates the loogie quite like China does. At any given moment in China, there are millions of people hawking enormous globs of phlegm and expelling them in great cascading arcs until they splatter on streets and sidewalks. It’s done for medicinal reasons, a way of expelling bad elements from the body.

The government has observed that westerners find the habit strange and more than a little icky and so they’ve undertaken a campaign to stifle the spitting. I can only hope that they fail.

Having grown up in a loogie-sensitive culture, to suddenly encounter a nation of hurling spitballs is one of those up-is-down, black-is-white experiences that periodically makes traveling so gratifying. I should note that I mean that in the broad, philosophical sense and not as an endorsement of spitballs and the like.

By page 50, you had pretty much predicted the financial crisis that was coming in America and done so (I’m guessing, given publishing deadlines) 10 months in advance. Yet most Americans seem dumbstruck about what is happening. Are most people just that ignorant or are you just that enlightened?

What to say here? I’m not happy with this. There is no gloating. In fact, this terrifies me. I–the C student in macroeconomics–could see this coming, while Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan, Hank Paulson et. al. could not. Every American should tremble in fear.

But where I think I had the advantage in terms of forecasting accuracy was that from 2003-2005 my wife and I were homeowners in the greater Sacramento area (long, digressive story). This put us in the belly of the beast that was the housing bubble.

For two years we listened to baristas at Starbucks talk about their investment properties and hairdressers at Great Clips discuss their imminent retirement now that they owned twelve houses in California, Arizona and Florida.

I had begun to wonder where, exactly, was all this home purchasing money coming from, which led to some investigating of the mortgage market and the mortgage securitization process.

In no time at all I was studying the Credit Suisse ARM reset chart and the long term Case-Schiller home price index and that got me looking into the historical relationship between home prices and household income, and it wasn’t long before I came to the inescapable conclusion that we as a society, as a nation, are utterly scroomed.

But I wish I was wrong.

Yak: Delicious or disgusting?

Photo byucumari

Delicious. However, I have spoken to others who have become wretchedly ill upon the consumption of yak. I don’t think that was the yak’s fault though.

You’re kind of a big sissy when it comes to airplanes. How do you deal with the fact that you have spent so many hours on them?

The words “big sissy” kind of understate the problem. I have issues with airplanes and after many hours of discussion with flight attendants and pilots I realize it’s not going to get better. I’m just hard-wired that way. There’s nothing that can be done. It might be a fear of falling issue. It might be a loss of control issue. I’m not sure what the root cause is.

But in any event, after many hours of chatting with air travel professionals I realize that my DNA does not lend itself to panic-free air travel. So whenever possible, I drive or take the bus, or ideally, a train. But, of course, given what I do, I am often obliged to fly.

And so I get on the plane because the alternative – a hermetic, stationary existence – is unacceptable.

I’m holding your hardcover book in my hands. What do you think of the fact that the written word may go the way of The Kindle, no longer bound by paper and glue (and a honey mustard stain)?

Possibly because I was abroad for most of the nineties and therefore missed the great leap forward into the digital age, I remain firmly in the dead tree camp. I cannot imagine a world without physical books and I don’t expect to see such a world in my lifetime.

But hey, whatever. If others prefer to read book-length material on a screen, so be it. It’s not as if the book publishing industry can afford to be picky.

Do your kids have any comprehension of what you do for a living?

Yes and no. It’s more like a seasonal thing. For the most part I’m there to take the kids to school. I’m there to make lunch. I’m there to read stories before naptime. I’m there to help out with the legos and the homework. I’m there for goofing around. I’m there for dinner. And bathtime. And storytime.

And then I’m gone.

For a month, two months, three months, I’m gone, somewhere on the far side of the world. And then I come back and it’s all good. And then there’s the deadline, which I tend to miss, and everything goes to hell for a while. Finally, there is a book. And then we start anew.

You’ve just been to India. Is there a book coming? How do they rate on a worldwide phlegm level?

Phlegm is not an issue in India so I’m not sure if I can get a book out of it. I jest.

We can all get over Acoustic Guitar Guy playing Jack Johnson in the corner.

We intrinsically know that the older dude from Montreal is going to fart in his sleep. And we accept that the front desk lady is going to lie about not having quarters, even though she has seven left in the drawer.

However, there are things that can be done to make a hostel more tolerable.

Photo by 733.

Your Peppercorn Is Not Wanted Here

I’ve nearly fainted while standing in an overheated kitchen, waiting for a place to cook Ramen Surprise. One man’s opinion: There’s just no need to make Coq Au Vin on a Bunsen Burner.

If you’re a backpacking gourmet, plan ahead and do whatever you can to make it speedier than Rachel Ray on trucker speed.

And please, stop scoffing at my meal while you’re braising your venison. Those bedbug’s track marks are inches from your spatula, just like the rest of ours.

Don’t Be A Ziplock Mary

Let’s get this straight: No matter how hard you try, a year’s supply of socks cannot be repackaged into a cubic centimeter.

Especially at the crack of dawn, when everyone is trying to catch some shuteye. Accept it: Your peas are going to touch your mashed potatoes. It’s 4am and we’re trying to sleep. Just cut the crap.

Photo by stuhaigh.

Gateway’s Drug

Sure the lobby computer is a gigantic piece of shit but it’s OUR gigantic piece of shit, filled with viruses, spyware and a cookie history that’s often criminal. This is not the time to install Worlds Of Warcraft or write an essay about Bungy Jump At Nevis.

Get on the computer, do your thing and get off. And please people, remember – Facebook is not the internet. It’s Facebook.

TV Room Hogs

Straight Up. You could just as easily take your lazy ass to a hammock and listen to Ben Harper there. This room is sacred – be cognizant of the fact that not everyone wants to marathon the Lethal Weapon films while you drink tallboys and intermittently fall asleep.

Surely there’s a Friends marathon going on at a nearby cafe, where you can wrap yourself in your sarong and order Pad Thai without shrimp.

Photo by nest hostels valencia.

That Isn’t Shampoo On The Floor

There’s a finite amount of soaping that one man can do in fifty minutes. We know what’s going on in there.

While we appreciate you not having seizures on the bunk above us, we also have to step into the shower after you and would appreciate some tidying up first. Use your brains, man.

Recognize Your Stank

It happens to everyone – laundry piles up. Employing The Pepsi Challenge on your socks is a good sign that you’re skunking the room.

Just because you Fabreeze your bra doesn’t meant that it will not smell like the jungle trek you’ve just left. A simple “hey does anyone else need to do laundry?” will usually find at least one other partner to help with funds and suds. Look at that – you’ve made another smelly friend.

Photo by denmar.

A Letter To The Guy Who Never Leaves The Room

Dear Sir. Why did you leave home? Don’t you get bored looking at the walls and repeatedly telling the story of your night dive on the Great Barrier Reef? How many times can you unpack and pack?

May I just have one moment alone here to collect my thoughts? You’ve been sitting indianstyle on your bunk for two days, reading The Davinci Code. There’s a whole other world out there, sir. Please?

Best Regards, Tom

Cushion Pushin

Oh, you two. We saw your snog session at the bar next door go from PG13 to NC17 in about four beers and two shots. We all know that you’re going to sneak into each other’s bunks in fifteen minutes.

As suggested in a recent article here, why to take it to a dark corner instead? There is no Invisibility Cloak for sex. You’re going to make The Noise and we’re all going to mock that noise for the rest of the week.

Photo by paper or plastic?.

Flip Employees A Brewski

They’re hostel workers, one click up the food chain from the guy who slits a cow’s throat before it is butchered.

We all know that they are going to spend their salary on weed and never make that trip to Nepal.

But still, they pick up our Twix wrappers and, well, worse. Even a pity bagel can make this person’s week. Pay it forward.

Any tips we missed? Share your thoughts in the comments!