by Matt Gross
The budget was $500 for a weekend (not including airfare or, often, rental car), which seemed reasonable—after all, I was not supposed to be a backpacker. These were, by definition, unaffordable places, so finding affordable hotels would be the primary challenge. But to make it more challenging yet, I decided to bring Jean along to my first Frugal destination: Newport, Rhode Island. Could two people not only survive a weekend in Edith Wharton’s Gilded Age haven but enjoy themselves as if money were no object?
This was not to be an easy weekend. Jean and I stayed in a $175-a-night motel (the best deal we could find) and in a homey hostel. We spent too much on parking, and on Mexican food, and on disappointing chowder. We felt too old at the beach, and too young touring the mansions. We missed out on free amusements—a polo match, a brewery tour—and we hiked until our feet hurt, then discovered our destination was closed. I fretted constantly about the budget; if I went over, would I incur my editors’ wrath? “I hate Newport,” I told Jean at one point.
And yet we had a wonderful time. We ogled Doris Duke’s wardrobe and ate at the hostel’s barbecue and drank California sparkling wine on a sunset cruise. We learned a video arcade had once been the city’s biggest brothel, and we found a delicious, inexpensive cup of chowder. We were together, in a new place, doing whatever we wanted because the New York Times had asked us to. This—this insane, expenses-paid undertaking!—was my job.
When I returned home, I began writing almost immediately. “For a beachy vacation spot,” I wrote, “Newport has an unusual theme: anxiety.”
In Edith Wharton’s day, one worried about impressing the social set. For one longtime resident, Doris Duke, shyness mutated into Paxil-worthy pathology. In Reversal of Fortune, the Hollywood adaptation of the Claus von Bülow trial, the objects of anxiety are dire: murder, justice, truth. Even those old Newport cigarette ads straddle the line between pleasure and terror, as the media critic Mark Crispin Miller once pointed out: Are those tan, rich folk laughing or screaming?
My anxiety, however, was purely of my own making. I was planning a last-minute weekend in Newport—land of Vanderbilt mansions and America’s Cup yachts—with a spending cap of $500. This sum was supposed to cover not only myself but also my travel companion, Jean, a fashion designer who, although laid-back and undemanding, deserved to experience a bit of the glamour for which Newport is famous. And glamour, as fashionable people know, rarely comes cheap.
This approach worked. The editors liked it, and readers seemed to as well. And it made sense to me. A travel story, I felt, shouldn’t just convey information about how to travel—service, as it’s called. Even if its raison d’être was to tell people how to save money while traveling, a good story should be a real narrative: with a beginning, middle, and end; with some goal that needs to be accomplished and isn’t certain until the end; and with a theme, some unifying element that deepens it beyond the basic tale of a journey from A to B.
From that point on, this was my model, for both Frugal Traveler stories (next up, Palm Beach and Jackson Hole) and the other articles I was writing. After Argentina and Jamaica, the Times sent me back to Southeast Asia for a month, and I produced my first 2,500-word cover stories, “To Be Young and Hip in Bangkok” and “Why Is Everybody Going to Cambodia?” By early 2006, my editors were hinting they wanted me to take over the Frugal Traveler column permanently, and when that “three-month, round-the-world trip” e-mail came in from Stuart, I was on a foodie road trip up the west coast of Malaysia. A year ago, I’d been hoping a novel might turn me into a travel writer. Now a dream I’d never even let myself dream was coming true.
Which made the failures of this Frugal Traveler’s first official weeks so maddening. What had I forgotten? Maybe I’d never known how to do this at all, and had just gotten lucky. Now I was being exposed for what I was—a copy editor out of his depth, with little talent for either traveling or writing.
On my way back to Venice, Stuart’s deputy, a young editor named Denny, called my cell phone, and we had a long conversation that boiled down to two things I needed to do. These were things I’d known I should do, but had never quite thought of them that way. As soon as he said them, I felt like an idiot. What Denny said was this:
My blog posts needed to (1) convey a sense of place, and (2) give a few frugal tips.
A sense of place? And some frugal tips? It was one of those head-slapping moments. How could I not have seen that that was all I needed to do? I mean, here I was riding into Venice—if I couldn’t convey a sense of that place, maybe I didn’t deserve the column. And frugal tips? Ditto.
But you know, I told myself, I can do this. Sense of place, frugal tips, sense of place, frugal tips—that was the mantra that ran through my mind as I roamed Venice, struggling through the throngs of tourists in Saint Mark’s Square, getting takeout calamari in a paper cone (€5 versus €10 to eat in), and sipping spritz cocktails in the mob-free bars of the Dorsoduro neighborhood. I focused: I took notes, I took photos, I took a cross-canal gondola ride for €0.50. Purple flowers sticking out a back-alley window. Passersby practicing arias at sunset. Toddlers blowing soap bubbles and schoolkids playing soccer. A fishmonger I’d spotted earlier, now dolled up in exquisite leather.
Nothing profound happened in my few days there, but nothing needed to. All I wanted was to get back to basics, and give myself enough time and space to produce a decent story. I’d figured out I’d have to change my schedule, too. No more trying to travel and write at the same time. From now on, I’d be active only from Wednesday morning through Sunday night, and devote Mondays and Tuesdays to nothing but my writing. I knew I could do this—I just needed to breathe, calm down, see things clearly.
The story that came out the next Wednesday was not great. But it was good enough. It did what Denny and Stuart had asked—sense of place, frugal tips—and they were happy. So was I. I was safe, and could concentrate on the next week’s destination (Croatia), and the next (Montenegro), and the next (Albania).
With each week, my confidence grew, despite the regular sniping of my readers in the comments section, who complained that I was either spending far too much money (“How dare you call yourself the Frugal Traveler?”*) or living like a backpacker. Denny and I argued occasionally about wording or structure, but these were minor matters, the normal things that always get hashed out between editors and writers. (Even if I sometimes sputtered with frustration at his inability to see the importance of my near-death experience in the mountains of Georgia! Although, really, as the adrenaline rush faded, I didn’t mind so much changing the lede.) I had a handle on things. Sense of place, frugal tips.
Accepting these basic constraints slowly freed me up to once again tackle more complicated themes and experiences. In rural Turkey, where I spent a handful of days at an apple orchard, the frugal tips were minimal, consisting primarily of this: There is an international program called WWOOFing, or World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, whose network of thousands of farms offer volunteers free food and lodging in exchange for their labor.
It sounded easy enough, but there were other challenges. The farmer, a fifty-five-year-old named Kemal Görgün, spoke about four words of English—yes, no, okay, and wow!—which was almost exactly how many words of Turkish I knew. As no other volunteers were around to translate (Kemal’s cat, Simi, was little help), we had to make the best of things, and so each morning we’d walk across his seven acres, set in the softly rolling green hills of Anatolia, and tie down the young branches of his apple trees, giving them an arcing silhouette. Kemal tried repeatedly to explain which branches to tie down, and how, and why, but I could never follow his logic, and always had to present my choices for the silent approval of his kind brown eyes.
At midmorning, we’d break for glasses of ayran, a salty yogurt drink, and when the muezzin sang out from the rocket-ship minaret of the village mosque, Kemal would chuckle and comment: “Pavarotti.” At noon, we’d lunch on hearty vegetable stews served with yogurt and crusty bre
ad, then explore the countryside, skipping stones in a pond or drinking sweet tea with Kemal’s friends in the village. (Preparing me for the social encounter, Kemal would mime shaking hands and say, “Ahmet, Mehmet . . . Ahmet, Mehmet . . . ”) In the evening, after a couple more hours working in the orchard, we’d make a new vegetable stew and play backgammon while listening to Keith Jarrett or Maria Callas on the stereo. Then Kemal would start a wood fire to heat water for our evening showers.
It was easy to sink into the placid rhythms of life on the farm, but with each day my curiosity grew. Kemal, I could see, was not like Ahmet, Mehmet, and the other farmers in the village. His clothes were sharper, his teeth in better shape; he didn’t have the weatherworn look of a man who’d spent a lifetime in the fields. Instead, he invited me to do yoga in the morning before breakfast. (“Matt,” he said, “after after after, yoga, please, okay?” In the future, I responded, I would try to keep it up.) And he had a “master trainer” certificate in neuro-linguistic programming.
After three nights, I wrote in my column that week (the first from that summer I’m comfortable quoting), my curiosity got the better of my reticence, and I broke out my Lonely Planet phrasebook and Kemal’s Turkish-English dictionary:
Through a mixture of basic vocabulary, hand gestures, exaggerated facial expressions, and frantic diagrams and doodles, Kemal told me of his life. He’d grown up near Konya, the hometown of the poet and founder of the Sufi sect, Rumi, and had spent his adulthood working as an engineer for various Istanbul companies. Finally, he’d gotten sick of the grind and was casting about for something new and more fulfilling to do when he had his Isaac Newton moment: apples!
In 2002, he bought the land at Beypinar, built his house and planted 2,500 apple trees. His plan was to get the orchards certified organic according to both Turkish and European standards, with the ultimate goal of selling his crops to Milupa, the big baby food company. So far, he’s accomplished the former, but not the latter.
That will come in time, I thought; after all, the farm is less than five years old. My more immediate concern was Kemal himself. The night before, he’d grown dizzy during backgammon and had to lie down and check his blood pressure; he was out here in the countryside alone, his two grown daughters unwilling to follow their father’s dream. Their mother . . . I couldn’t figure out how to ask about her.
“Are you sure you’re okay living by yourself?” I asked him in primitive, ungrammatical Turkish. “Don’t you get lonely?”
Kemal tapped his heart, smiled and said, “Apples.” Translation: Don’t worry—I’m finally doing what makes me happy.
The next day, Kemal and I drove to the coastal town of Priapos, named for the way its peninsula juts into the sea, and wandered among the Greco-Roman ruins before eating a long, lazy, late lunch of grilled fish, meze, and lots of raki, the cloudy, anise-flavored liquor that is Turkey’s national drink. As dusk approached, we drove home, past fields of wheat and sunflowers catching the last golden rays, and although we were mostly silent, Kemal eventually spoke a few words.
“Matt Gross, Kemal Görgün,” he said. “Arkadaşlar, kardeşler.”
Arkadaşlar, I recognized: friends. But I had to flip through my phrasebook to translate kardeşler. Finally, I found it—brothers.
Wow.
I wrote the story on a bus back to Istanbul, tapping it out letter by letter on the screen of my PDA (the wireless keyboard had finally died). And when I sent it to New York, I knew it was right—not only in need of little editing but philosophically perfect. I had conveyed a sense of place and offered a frugal tip or two, and had gotten down to the business of exploring the world and making new friends, which was all I’d ever wanted to do. Frugality, I believed and tried to explain, was not an end unto itself but one of many traveler’s tools, a means of getting closer to exotic lands and foreign peoples.
For the rest of the summer, I relaxed. I knew what I was doing. And my bosses knew it too. In August, I wrote about taking a forty-eight-hour train trip across China, from Urumqi to Beijing, and woke one morning to a new e-mail from Stuart, sent to his entire staff. “When you get a chance today,” he wrote, “be sure to read Matt’s latest installment, now on the Web, about his train trip through China. It’s one of his best. As he winds down—there are just two more to go—he’s gaining steam, not losing it.”
For the next roughly four years, I was the Frugal Traveler—or, as the Times preferred I phrase it, I wrote the Frugal Traveler column. My stories appeared irregularly. Maybe every six weeks or so, I’d have a piece about a $500 weekend in some expensive destination: Punta del Este, Dubai, Hong Kong, Barcelona. Some features were frugal-themed without being labeled as Frugal Traveler stories: drifting around the Caribbean on EasyCruise, the hard-partying budget cruise line, and an insane seven-day jaunt from Geneva to Prague to Copenhagen to London to Fez to Paris to Budapest and back to Geneva, taking a different low-cost airline (RyanAir, FlyBaboo, and so on) every day. And as the following summer approached, I planned a new saga: a cross-country road trip during which I’d not only write a weekly column but would also shoot a weekly video segment. The summer after that, I’d circle Europe for the Frugal Grand Tour.
I was working, and constantly. In total, I was spending three to six months a year on the road, away from Jean (whom I’d married a few weeks after returning from the round-the-world trip) and my friends in New York, but writing about fascinating places. And the more I wrote, the more I developed a formula for my Frugal stories. It began with the anecdote that opened the article. In a normal story, I would want something that simply evoked that sense of place, or set up the drama to unfold, but in a Frugal Traveler piece I had to add an economic angle.
When I wrote about Istanbul, for instance, I started off with getting the bill at a cybercafé: “One million lira!” piped the cashier. She meant, I quickly realized, 1 million old Turkish lira, which would be 1 new Turkish lira, or about 65 cents. Whew. The Frugal Traveler dodges a bullet—and also gets an opportunity to talk about how in Istanbul, it’s not simply the hoary travel-writer trope of old and new clashing but is actually something weirder, more complex, and more interesting: old and new so jumbled up that no one really knows (or perhaps cares) which is which.
Likewise, when I first wrote about Rome, I described drinking a civilized Negroni at a tony piazza, a brief splurge that was interrupted when a seagull violently attacked a pigeon amid the well-dressed Romans, while the bells of a nearby church rang out. This show was worth the €10 price of admission, a cost that included not just my drink but a host of free snacks. Frugal Traveler paradise—plus a way to hint at the Felliniesque (or should that be Pasoliniesque?) turmoil lurking just under the surface of the Eternal City.
Now, “formulaic” is not necessarily the most laudatory way to describe a piece of writing, but for a very long time I was happy to be working within a formula. There’s something comforting about knowing intimately your constraints (sense of place, frugal tips) and not struggling against them. Most professional writing—that is, feature stories written for newspapers and magazines—follows a formula, and the formulas exist because they work well for conveying information. The opening anecdote sucks you in, the nut graf explains why you’ve just been told the anecdote, and the rest follows through on the narrative premise, with the final few paragraphs wrapping everything up in a way that’s neat, but not so neat as to seem preprogrammed. Fulfilling the formula so that it doesn’t feel like a formula is just about the apex of professional writing.
Writing for the Times, however, involved additional constraints that tweaked my experience in unusual ways. The first, and most famous, of these was the Travel section’s absolute ban on writers taking press trips, those junkets sponsored by airlines, hotel chains, tourism boards, and P.R. firms. No writer, says the paper’s Policy on Ethics in Journalism, “may accept free or discounted services or preferential treatment from any element of the travel industry.” It didn’t matter whether you were wor
king on a piece for the Times or someone else. The ethics questionnaire that freelancers were required to complete asked whether they’d taken a press trip within the last two years; if you had, the section simply would not—could not—hire you.
This caused some consternation among many travel writers, who relied on press trips to get around the world and report the stories they’d then pitch, to the Times or wherever. How could they afford to do research otherwise? To the Times, it didn’t matter, and justifiably so: The paper was constantly under attack—usually politically, but sometimes from the standpoint of how it practiced journalism—and it didn’t need any further conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Few writers, however, fell victim to this policy, as the Travel section’s editors seemed to operate according to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” trusting prospective freelancers to come clean from the beginning and only acting when a contributor’s “ethical lapse” inadvertently came to light.
For me, this was not a problem. Though I was a freelancer*, the paper had me traveling and writing enough that I didn’t need to seek out alternatives, and the paper paid my relatively frugal expenses. (Expenses for cover stories rarely topped $2,000—that’s airfare, food, lodging, supplies, and so on, for maybe two weeks of travel.) Once in a while, I’d receive an e-mail offering a trip somewhere—a twenty-two-day round-the-world-by-private-jet tour of Four Seasons resorts, for example—and I’d politely decline, citing Times policy. Although I occasionally wished for a bit more comfort on the road, I liked living by this rule, and not having to deal with the favor-trading world of publicists and comps. And besides, when it came to writing, I appreciated the built-in drama of traveling on my own, on a budget. What could I possibly say about a trip where everything was provided for me?