Sebastian Modak is a freelance travel writer and multimedia journalist based in New York City. In 2019, he was selected to be the New York Times 52 Places Traveler, which saw him traveling to and reporting from all the destinations on the Times’ “52 Places to Go” list. Before that, he spent about three years as an editor and then a staff writer at Condé Nast Traveler. He also worked as a producer for Rebel Music, a documentary series by MTV World about music and social change around the globe. Prior to that, in 2013, he was one of four recipients of the Fulbright-mtvU Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year in Botswana documenting the local hip-hop scene. Sebastian is of mixed Colombian and Indian heritage and has lived in six countries on four continents.
How did you get started traveling?
I was incredibly lucky to have started traveling from a very young age. I was born in the U.S. to an Indian father and a Colombian mother and I think they had trouble compromising on where “home” should be. As a result, we moved roughly every 4 years and took frequent trips from wherever we happened to be living. My brothers and I were raised without roots, but with a lot of value put on travel, cross-cultural interaction and curiosity about the world around us. That never went away, even after I graduated from high school in Indonesia and flew the coop.
How did you get started writing?
I always gravitated towards reading and writing. From when I was probably too young to understand the material, I pored over Tintin and Calvin and Hobbes comics and devoured any fantasy or sci-fi I could get my little hands on. Growing up in multiple countries, mostly in international schools, led to an interest in the world around me and contributed to my decision to study English with a focus on postcolonial literature and history with a focus on so-called “world” history (i.e. everything but North America and Europe) in college. I’m a drummer and music nerd too, so I edited the music section of our college magazine, which was my initial foray into the quasi-professional world of writing. From then on, it was pretty clear I wanted to tell stories for a living, but it took a few more years to find my passion for writing about travel specifically. Before that, I seriously considered documentary filmmaker, ethnomusicologist and studio drummer as possible career paths.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Getting a “break” is very subjective. In my own little world, I think the first time I felt like I could actually pull off doing this for a living was when I was keeping up a blog while spending a college semester abroad in Botswana. The blog got selected as the “Travel Blog of the Year” by some South African tourism site and that little bit of recognition did a lot in terms of my self-confidence. Of course, I am intentionally not including a link to said blog here as I’m sure many of the observations and writing choices I made as a 20-year-old would make me (and anyone reading it) cringe.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
There are many, but I think one of the biggest is finding that sweet spot between overplanning and winging it. I’ve done both, when traveling for vacation or for a story. If you go into a place with your itinerary completely mapped out down to every meal and bus ride, you’re not leaving room to learn anything new. If you get out of a plane without having even a hotel booked, you run the risk of being bogged down by logistics and planning when you should be out meeting people and eating things. The ideal is somewhere in between, where you have enough of a framework to get started (even if it’s knowing what path is well-trodden so you can do something else) but leaving enough space for serendipity. More often than not, that serendipity is going to be what leads to the most treasured memories and the best stories.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
At a time when we’re so saturated with information about everywhere — both crowd-sourced and from established publications — the biggest challenge is finding something new to say about a place and not falling back on established narratives or stereotypes. It’s really important to me that if I’m just parachuting into a place, which I did over and over again during the “52 Places” trip for example, that I find something unique to say. Because of how I was raised and the values I continue to espouse, I’m never going to consider myself an authority on anywhere, so what tidbit of observation, analysis, or narrative can I offer that is going to be useful to not only someone who might be planning a trip to the place in question but also someone who might never get to that place?
I want to pull out actionable tips, sure, but I also want to offer some lessons about the world at large. That starts with finding something different to say. I’m not offering anything — in fact, I think I’m actually doing some damage — by being the umpteenth travel writer to describe the “vivid colors” and “beautiful chaos” of an Indian city or the “ethereal beauty” of a foggy loch in Scotland. I’m far more interested in throwing those preconceptions out the window and meeting someone or having an experience that is going to inform a new window into a place and its people. That can be difficult, especially when you’re on a time-crunch, but I don’t think I have a story worth telling until I achieve that.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Um, that I chose to be a travel writer in the first place? There’s a lot of overhead in this business and publications that will fully cover expenses are becoming rarer and rarer. At the same time, writers are discouraged (or outright prohibited) from taking sponsored or discounted trips for their reporting. That leaves a very thin sliver of writers who can hustle hard enough, be lucky enough (me), or are independently wealthy enough to support a travel writing career. It’s a dream job, yes, but it’s also an incredibly difficult and often exhausting job. And that’s before taking into account the barriers to entry for BIPOC writers in a space that has traditionally been dominated by white people who are assumed to be authorities about wherever they want to go.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Many times. I’ve written and/or edited corporate reports, website copy and brochures to pay rent. I’ve taken on thankless ghostwriting gigs. I’m hoping that as my career progresses, I’ll be able to do less and less of that, but considering the state of the industry, I think that’s pretty far-fetched.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Like many travel writers, I grew up reading a whole lot of white men: Bryson, Theroux, Chatwin, Krakauer, to name some of them. I admire them all and they played a big role in forming my own writing style and my decision to get into travel writing in the first place. But a formative experience for me was reading An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie, the story of a Togolese man who traveled, largely overland, to Greenland on a whim. It felt like a major shift in perspective and showed me that you didn’t have to be a white man to have something to say about the world around you. I think to change travel writing, to help it evolve, we have to first admit that it is a field that grew largely out of colonialism — the khaki-clad officer recounting his experience in the “exotic” East.
For that reason, while I’m grateful for the contributions made by my predecessors, I’m much more interested in what the travel writers of my generation are doing. Sarah Khan, Benjamin Kemper, Nneka Okona, Eliot Stein, Tariro Mzezewa — these are some names off the top of my head, but the list goes on and on… I care a lot about what they write and the conversations that they inform. That’s going to be even more important in the months and years ahead, as travel hits the reset button. The world of travel is facing multiple reckonings at once: the coronavirus, a long-overdue self-examination around racism and representation, questions about the industry’s contribution to climate change. It’s the young voices that I want to hear from as we formulate a new normal.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Read a lot. While the classics of travel writing are classics for a reason, dive into fiction too. Notice the way writers like Arundathi Roy or Nuruddin Farah conjure a sense of place without hammering you over the head with tired tropes and stereotypes. Channel that subtlety and awareness. Then, Google the place you are going and read what’s already been said about it. It’s likely that there’s something others have missed; something that you’re only going to learn if you admit your own ignorance and talk to people who know more than you about that place (that is, every single person you meet that’s from there). Then write, write and write — even if it’s for no one in particular. If you can’t afford a trip halfway around the world, go to a neighborhood you’ve never been to. Jump on a bike and see how far you can go before burning out. Keep a blog of your travels so you have something to show when you start pitching. I was an editor once, and, when assigning pieces, I cared a lot more about seeing how a person wrote and what they wrote about than who they wrote for.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
It’s the people I’ve met on my travels. I’ve said and written this many times before, but it still bears repeating: when I look back at my travels, the first things that come to mind aren’t monuments or even meals. The first image in my mind is always of the people I met along the way. The sheep farmer on a small Dutch island, the seal hunter in Greenland, the rapper in Botswana: they taught me more than any museum or guide book and have stuck with me more than any canyon or fjord (though those are plenty nice too). I feel a rush of joy every time my phone lights up with a WhatsApp message from someone far away I may have momentarily forgotten about, and I see they’re just checking in. The world suddenly feels a little smaller and a lot more hopeful. Without those connections made across cultures, travel would be pointless.
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