Stuart McDonald is an Australian travel writer based in Indonesia. He cofounded Travelfish in 2004, and has been writing about the region since 1997. He currently lives in Bali with his partner Samantha, their two kids, and their dog Skye Govinda.
How did you get started traveling?
I started traveling early, off the back of my father’s work, living in Japan, South Korea and Italy in the late 70s and early 80s. I think that period is what planted the travel seed in me. Later, in 1992, I purchased a RTW ticket ex-Sydney, and as a part of that I had to pick a port in Southeast Asia as a part of the ticket. At the time I knew nothing of the region, India had been my focus, and I picked Bangkok for no reason other than I knew where it was. In late ’93 I arrived late at night at Don Muang airport on a flight from Kathmandu, and I walked out of the terminal, smelt the air and it seemed everyone had a motorbike. It was love at first sight, and I’ve been in the region on and off since, returning for six months every year since ’94 and moving to Southeast Asia in ’97. I’ve been here ever since, living in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia. The 1990s were a great time to travel in Southeast Asia.
How did you get started writing?
In 1994 I travelled to Vietnam. The country had only really “reopened” to independent travel a couple of years earlier, so it was pretty rough and ready travel (i.e. it was awesome). The Lonely Planet guidebook I was using, to my novice eyes back then, didn’t seem very good. (I’ve since learned plenty about guidebooks, and considering the difficulties the writers would have faced putting it together at the time, it was solid.) So a couple of friends and myself tried to do something better, and self-published a Vietnam guidebook in ’95. Two years later, we published a guidebook to Thailand. Then the currency crisis came along and I moved on to other typical work in Bangkok (a bit of travel freelance for local publications, teaching English, embassy work, and a long stint at a newspaper), and launched Travelfish with Samantha in 2004.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I’ve mostly written for Travelfish, as I found freelance too frustrating to rely on. So I guess I’d say the “break” was seeing that as the way to do it. Otherwise, writer Freda Moon wrote some very kind words about Travelfish in the New York Times, and yes, even today, that makes my day.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
The workload and the pace of travel can be exhausting. Travel writer Celeste Brash once described travel writing as “seeing everything but experiencing nothing,” and I strongly agree with that. The hardest thing is often having to leave somewhere you’ve realized you love, and likewise staying somewhere you hate.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Travel guide research is a different beast to feature writing, and the work can be monotonous. You don’t just need to know what time the bus goes from A to B, you need to know where all the buses to everywhere go, how long they take, what they cost, etc. You don’t have to find one good hotel, you need to find twenty. A lot of the time it is a small step above data collection and it can be mundane. Solid planning is essential—it isn’t quite a military expedition, but it isn’t far off. Pre-trip research is a huge part of the deal, but also on the ground, as you go. Finding new sources, deciding if what they suggest is worth chasing up—it can work out really well, other times, not so much—but that’s travel, it would be boring if everything went to plan.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Making money. It has been a roller coaster ride. Travelfish has had extremely lucrative spells (by my standards!), and others when we’ve lost money hand over fist. Often what affects your bottom-line is totally out of your control, Covid is the obvious case study, but others can be equally devastating—a Google algorithm change for example, and doesn’t always relate to the quality of what you’re delivering to readers. Travel patterns change, places slip out of favor. Anything you review is out of date the moment you step outside.
Making things more challenging is that Travelfish has always worked on a strict no freebies, no media-rates basis, so that puts us on a different cost-setting compared to most other travel publishers. We have always paid our own way, always, without exception.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
Yes. In the early years, I was supported by my partner Samantha, who was a journalist at the time. In other lean years I’ve done freelance and editing, along with programming work (I built the Travelfish site). Travelfish is a business where the money flows, through: When we were doing well, we hired (and spent) more—at one stage we had 17 regular paid contributors—in the lean years it was just me.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
In the travel area I’m really enjoying Kapka Kassabova and Monisha Rajesh at the moment. In the past I read Ryszard Kapuściński a lot (yeah, I know people think he made a lot of stuff up—it still made for great reading). I’ve read quite a bit of Paul Theroux’s work, though that genre of writing is certainly slipping out of favor for many, myself included. My advice would be to look beyond the white-guy-of-means-traveling-in-the-exotic” theme when looking for inspiration.
The book that inspired my initial round-the-world trip was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—I’m not sure anyone has ever classified that as travel literature though.
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Marry wisely. Other than that, don’t quit your day job. Only in the very best of Travelfish years could it have supported me living in Australia—in Southeast Asia though, I’ve mostly been able to live quite comfortably.
I read something by Graham Holliday (author of Eating Vietnam) quite a few years ago, about “how to become a foreign correspondent,” and a large part of the advice was to move somewhere new, where you don’t know the language, that isn’t well covered internationally, and start there. Perhaps not a great approach to making a lot of money, but it is a great way to starting to understand where you live, and possessing that understanding is essential if you are going to have any credibility when you decide to start writing about it.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Meeting someone (either a traveler or a business operator) who has had their life positively changed in part due to something I was responsible for having written.
Share This
