On Writing the Guidebook by Bradley Winterton

When I was first invited to write a guidebook, I accepted with what now seems the alacrity of the innocent.

It was one of those gorgeous autumn days that seem to reward Hong Kong after all the unpleasant, humid months of summer. The sunlight danced on the blue waters of the harbour, a yacht spread its white wings to catch the soft breeze, and for once the great emporium on the south China coast seemed like one of the legendary landfalls of the Mediterranean - Genoa, Athens or Barcelona.

“We’re doing this guidebook series,” the publisher had said, “concentrating for the moment on Asia. Several of them are already in the bag. Are there any of the countries still left that you fancy?”
I looked over his shoulder at the piece of paper he was holding. It contained a list of the countries of Asia, with large ticks beside some of them. China, Japan, Korea - these were already accounted for.
“Thailand?” I said hopefully.
“Already commissioned, I’m afraid. Sorry about that.” He turned to me with a smile. “How about Indonesia?”

I contemplated for a moment the vast country stretching three and a half thousand miles over three time zones, this chain of islands that appeared to be doing its best to link India and Australia.
“I’m not much of an Indonesia expert, I’m afraid,” I replied, with all the modesty I could summon. “How about...” And I named another Asian destination that I thought might prove to be of more manageable proportions.
“Hmm. I’ll see what my partners think and let you know.” And with that I was ushered out into the brilliant noonday of a Hong Kong October.

I lunched with a friend, an editor of repute who was also something of an old Asia hand.
“As it’s your first book,” he said, eyeing me over the spring rolls and Cantonese noodles, “I think you’re absolutely right not to want to take on too much. Indonesia as a whole would be a mammoth undertaking. But what about Bali? It’s easily the most interesting island in the archipelago, culturally speaking - and I know things cultural are your particular enthusiasm. An awful lot of tourists go there nowadays - wouldn’t that suit your publisher fellow’s pocket-book? Fascinating place, too. Wouldn’t mind a holiday there myself, come to think of it.”

I assured him earnestly it wouldn’t be a holiday, but even so my mind was racing. I’d been to Bali before, and even then sworn that one day I would go back when I had enough time to explore the place in depth. Wouldn’t this be the ideal opportunity?

In the languid heat of the afternoon, I wandered into the cool of a bookshop. A guidebook! I hadn’t examined till then quite what such a project would involve. Months on end lying on sunny beaches at someone else’s expense? The idea seemed too good to be true. Of course, I would have to produce something at the end of it all. But would it really have to be more than just a record of how wonderful it all had been, a straightforward description of those untouched beaches, those welcoming hotels, those endless, sumptuous restaurants?

Just to give myself an idea of what I was in for, however, I browsed through some of the numerous guides on the shelves. Travel appeared to constitute one of the bigger sections of the shop, and there were plenty of them, all bursting with colour photos and gushing prose. I didn’t, I reflected, consider it exactly an inviting literary genre. The more I thought about it, the more forbidding the task seemed. On the one hand a guidebook writer had to be lively, interesting and readable, yet on the other he also had to be trustworthy, reliable and practical. The simple travel writer can be - indeed, is positively expected to be - idiosyncratic, even eccentric, but something rather different is asked of the writer of a guidebook. He has, in addition to everything else, to be imposingly authoritative.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the guidebook was a bastard literary form, halfway between a telephone directory and a topographical sonnet sequence. It’s a conclusion, I may say, I still haven’t rejected.

Nevertheless, I persevered. Life, I thought, rarely favours the faint of heart. And so when, a few days later, I received a call from my prospective publisher saying the country I had proposed had been vetoed by his colleagues, I countered with the suggestion of Bali. Four weeks later we were signing the contract.

And so it was that one February afternoon I took the plane from a now gray and overcast Hong Kong to what, by any criterion, is a celebrated and magical island. My mind, perhaps inevitably, was full of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”. In that play, too, there was a coral island where people underwent a mysterious change, experiencing their anxieties and antagonisms being transformed into something rich and strange. What transformations would I experience, I wondered, in this land where, laden with flowers, they danced in their temples at the full moon, and worshipped gods who lived on he summits of volcanoes?

That evening I was greeted in the hot Balinese night by the scent of cloves. What could be more appropriate, I thought, for an island where Europeans first ventured in search of spices? The source of the aroma, however, turned out to be local night workers smoking ‘kretek’, the popular Indonesian clove-flavoured cigarettes.

The first thing I had to do was find myself somewhere to stay. The expenses I’d been allowed wouldn’t permit anything luxurious, but then Bali isn’t a place where luxury is really necessary, or even particularly desirable. If you’ve got a room that’s virtually on the beach, and the sun’s blazing down all of every day, and there are a host of small beach restaurants within yards, what more really do you need?

I did have one small problem, though. I needed a base in which to arrange my books and papers, not to mention somewhere to give me a sense of continuity and semi-permanence; and yet I knew I would be away a lot seeing the different parts of the island.

I was lucky enough, after a couple of days, to happen on a medium-priced establishment three minutes’ walk from the sea where I was given a room for my exclusive use with the understanding that I need pay only for those nights I actually slept there. What more could I have asked for?

I quickly established my routine. This was to set out on small, day-length sorties researching specific places, and to intersperse these with longer trips lasting several days during which I researched the farther-flung parts of the island.

In addition to this division of Bali into manageable portions, I had to arrange somehow to see and discover everything possible about the huge range of temple dances, cremations, tooth-filing ceremonies, anniversary festivals and associated rituals for which the island is so justly famous.

I was lucky enough in this last task to encounter one of the local aristocrats who invited me to stay with his family and witness one of the biggest cremations his district had seen for some time, together with, on the day before the actual cremation, celebrations and dances I would, in all probability, never otherwise have seen.

Despite all this coming and going, checking and assessing, I considered it likely that I would be able to spend some time at least on the beach. Could not an afternoon in the sun be considered as researching the ambiance of a particular resort? And how could I describe a legendary sunset without settling down with an iced fruit-juice and taking a long and measured look at it?

And of course there were such times. It turned out in the end, though, to be almost all very hard work. There were the days when I would be bumping along what seemed like endless earth roads in a Balinese ‘bemo’ (truck) with little to show at the end of it other than a few paragraphs my editor would eventually opt, over a glass of wine, to discard.

In the end I climbed volcanoes in the night under a full moon, endured hideous journeys across pathless terrain to view desolate coastlines, spent sleepless nights in mosquito-infested ‘losmen’ (guesthouses) listening to the deafening chirrup of crickets, stomped around remote night-markets lit only by the rays of paraffin lamps, bathed in muddy hot-springs, and had my life saved by the Surf Rescue on Kuta Beach.

And after it all, I became convinced that, these days anyway, it’s an unusual kind of person who gets drawn into writing guidebooks. We’re either apprentice writers stretching our fledgling wings, or we’re obsessive eccentrics determined to get to the bottom of things, come what may.

There are intrinsic attractions to writing a guidebook, whatever type of person, or writer, you are. To begin with, you not only know people who are going to read it - you have also the strange and unusual satisfaction of knowing by and large where different portions of it are likely to be read.

The introduction, you imagine, will be read either at home before setting out, or else on the plane. It should therefore entice and inform in equal proportions - and inform with, by and large, a long perspective.

Your descriptions of sites, you can be pretty certain, will for the most part be read on the site itself, the visitor actually standing there with your guidebook in his hand. On your right, you can advise him, stands so-and-so, on your left this, that or the other. It’s an unusual privilege, and it bestows on the guidebook writer a not-inconsiderable responsibility.

But it is when writing about hotels and restaurants that the guidebook writer holds the greatest power. Travellers will almost certainly read these sections while trying to make their choices. In this area, a hard word can cost a proprietor dearly, and a kind word reward him generously indeed. Needless to say, opportunities for getting one’s palm oiled are legion, and have to be - often very firmly - resisted.

One of the most intriguing aspects of researching a place is discovering people who have been there before you. This is particularly interesting in Bali because it’s a place that has attracted the interest of a particular type of romantic, even mystic, for some time. Certainly since the 1920s, it has been drawing men and women filled with a longing to find simultaneously a paradise, and a refuge from what they took to be the shortcomings of the societies that had bred them back home.

These privileged visitors, talented and untalented alike, didn’t leave the magical island unpublicised. The art critic Geoffrey Gorer, writing in 1935 after a leisurely Far Eastern tour that had taken in Sumatra, Java, Bali, Thailand and Cambodia, commented on Bali: “In the last 10 years this island has been written about, filmed, photographed, and gushed over to an extent that would justify nausea.” Nonetheless, he ended up leaving the place “wholly unwillingly, convinced that I had seen the nearest approach to Utopia I am ever likely to see.”

Trance dances were much appreciated by painters and independently-minded observers anxious to avoid the oppressive conformities they perceived as dominating Western life. And the inland village of Ubud was already becoming what it is now, a Mecca for the culturally and spiritually inclined. Today, those anxious to avoid the often raunchy sun, sea and sand culture of Kuta Beach take the two-hour drive up to Ubud for some peace and quiet, plus a spot of Legong Dance in the evenings. Sixty years ago, people found a house, lugged their easels up from the road, and arranged to live there for the duration.

K’tut Tantri was, though hardly typical of anything, a representative figure. She drove down to Bali from Jakarta in an old but capacious car, and presented herself to someone she doesn’t name in her memoirs but must have been the Rajah of Klungkung while he was unsuspectingly celebrating a temple festival. The oddity of an unaccompanied Western woman arriving unannounced notwithstanding, she was quickly made welcome and installed as an honoured guest of the Rajah’s household. She responded by adopting Balinese dress, taking a Balinese name, and dying her red hair black to better harmonise with batik colours.

Then, rebuffed by the Dutch administrators based in the north in Singaraja, she turned her attentions to the south of the island and was the first person to purchase a patch of coconut grove and establish an ‘international’ hotel on Kuta Beach. It wasn’t long before celebrities were making their way to this soon-famous hostelry, and its wild dancing and feasting Balinese-style (or, one suspects, pseudo-Balinese-style) became notorious among the Dutch officials, busy attempting to preserve their superior status as the island’s rulers.

In the end, I left Bali with a stack of tattered notebooks, a wad of maps, a small sack containing every scrap of printed material relating to the island I’d been able to lay my hands on, and a head full of memories and ideas that still had to be committed to paper.

Not that my prolonged stay had been without its moments. I’ll never forget the hotel proprietor - though I would happily forget if I could his sadly empty establishment - who, as I left on the back of a motorbike, ran after me calling “Please praise my hotel in your book! Please recommend my hotel very, very highly!”

Nor will I ever forget sitting and writing, on the spot, words of impassioned rhetoric in praise of the view from the temple of Ulu Watu, and of the breakers far below, while a troupe of sacred monkeys made off up into a tree with my camera.

Back in Hong Kong, the penultimate phase consisted of two months’ solid work on Bali’s history and culture in the university library. When I’d finished, my editor friend asked me what I’d been most pleased at discovering. My reply was finding out K’tut Tantri’s other names - she’d been born Vannine Walker (on the Isle of Man), and had written books under the pseudonym of Muriel Pearson.

And then there were the captions to the photographs to be written, headings and sub-headings to be penned, and finally months of waiting when, infuriatingly at first, there was nothing left for me to do.

Then at last the great day, the day of publication, arrived. Or rather the approximate day. The actual first appearance of the book took me by surprise. I’d wandered into my publisher’s office on some minor piece of business, when he looked up from his desk and said “Here - want one of these?”

And there it was - the book at last in my hands. I can’t describe the thrill of that moment - it was half pleasure at seeing what had once been words scribbled in a cheap notebook new handsomely printed side by side with magnificent photographs, half a bizarre kind of relief at the fact that the thing was finished, and that now I couldn’t change it even if I wanted to.

Back home I sat endlessly looking at it, reading (I must confess) certain passages over and over. Writing it had been a wonderful experience, I thought, but never again - the labour, the research and compiling of information, had simply been too arduous, and gone on too long.

Suddenly the phone rang. My first fan? An angry hotel manager threatening to sue? I picked up the receiver. It was my publisher.
“Like the look of it? Nice, isn’t it. Listen - an author who was going to work for us has just called and backed out. I’ve been thinking - how would you like to write a guide to Thailand?”