by Matt Gross
Another Times rule was more troublesome. “Writers of travel articles,” the ethics policy says, “must conceal their identity as journalists during the reporting, so that they will experience the same conditions as an ordinary consumer.”
In theory, this made sense, especially for my Frugal Traveler stories. If I was to help New York Times readers travel smarter and cheaper, I couldn’t rely on my vaunted status to get better treatment. I had to be—and to write as—an Everyman. But in practice, that was not so simple. While I could easily hide my identity from hotels and restaurants—the professional travel world—many of my stories revolved around civilians: friends of friends, random strangers, normal people whose livelihoods did not depend upon a favorable mention in the New York Times.
How should I treat them? Should I simply lie when they asked what I did for a living, or would that violate other clauses of the ethics policy? And if I told them the truth, wouldn’t that, too, alter how they treated me? No longer was I just that interesting (or dull) traveler but the one and only Frugal Traveler, in need of aid and advice! Or was this just a fantasy? Would anyone care who I was?
Early on, I got a sense of how this all worked. In September 2005, I flew to Jamaica to explore the area around Port Antonio, a region that was the first to develop tourist facilities but, because it was always hit hardest by hurricanes, had failed to keep pace with Negril and Ocho Rios. It was a rough, wet, wild, and beautifully green place, at once rundown and vibrant. Hotels could be damp and crummy—or pristine and far beyond my budget. I sat on the sidewalk talking with old barefoot Rastas, and I drank Hennessy from fresh-cut coconuts in rented villas, and I heard famous names: India Arie, Francesca von Habsburg, Ian Fleming.
My guide through the area was Jon Baker, a British music producer and a friend of a friend. With him, I saw no reason to hide my identity, nor with his weird circle of friends and acquaintances, ranging from Kingston high-society types to strippers. And for one week of hiking, dancing, and eating jerk chicken, the fact that I was a New York Times writer did not matter to anyone.
But on my last night in Jamaica, I checked in to Strawberry Hill, a luxurious resort in the mountains right above Kingston, fairly far from Port Antonio. Owned by Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records and discoverer of Bob Marley, Strawberry Hill was a collection of studios and villas straight out of some nineteenth-century colonial fantasy, and in line with that fantasy, the first thing I did after putting my bags in my room was head to the bar for a gin-and-tonic.
After placing the drink in front of me, the bartender asked for my room number. I told him, and his response was, “Oh! Hello, Mr. Gross.”
This was strange, I thought—or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe at these small high-end resorts, it was standard practice for employees to know the names of guests.
“So, Mr. Gross,” the bartender went on, “what brings you to Strawberry Hill?”
“Well,” I told him, “I’ve been in Jamaica a week, and I’m leaving tomorrow, and I just wanted to spend one night somewhere beautiful and quiet where I could relax.”
The bartender wiped down some glasses, then said, “Are you by any chance a writer?”
“Yes,” I said, slowly and with great suspicion. “How did you know that?”
“Oh, no reason,” he said. “It’s just that when people come here for quiet, solitude, and relaxation, they tend to be writers. That’s all.” Uh-huh, I thought. “Excuse me,” he said, and went to take an order down the bar.
This was beyond strange—this was nerve-wracking. Had I really been made? What would this mean for my story? Could I even spend the night here, or would I have to check out?
“Look,” the bartender said a few minutes later, “I knew who you were when you walked in. They told me, ‘If Matt Gross comes in here, he’s a writer—take good care of him.’”
My mind raced. Someone I’d met had told someone else who I was, and the news had spread through secret channels around the island. But where was the link? How could I trace the trail? “Who,” I asked, “is ‘they’?”
He didn’t want to answer, but in the end he said, “the chef.” I told him I’d need to talk with this chef—but first I had to eat dinner: a marvelous jerk lamb with guava sauce. Was it always this delicious, or was I getting a special cut of meat?
Afterward, the chef—Darren Lee, a third-generation Chinese-Jamaican—came out of the kitchen to chat. And although he was incredibly friendly and open, he did not disclose his source—“blame the bush network,” he joked—adding that he was the only one at Strawberry Hill who knew, not the front desk or management. Then he handed me a bottle of his homemade chili sauce, a fiery green slurry of Scotch bonnets and vinegar that was the best I’d ever tasted.
Fine, I thought, I guess I can spend the night here. And luckily, when time came to write the story, I found I didn’t have space to mention Strawberry Hill at all. Ethical dilemma averted!
In the future, though, I swore to be more circumspect. From then on, when people asked me what I did back in New York, I’d deflect. I’d answer, “Not much!” Then we’d all laugh and move on to the next topic. (Once, a fellow New Yorker sitting next to me in a cruise-ship hot tub said, “No, seriously, you live in New York. What do you do for work?”) Sometimes I varied my response: “I have a small regular income that allows me to travel regularly, but not luxuriously.” After my daughter was born, I’d explain that I was a stay-at-home dad (mostly true), that my wife’s job supported us (very true; at best, I was making no more than I had at New York), and that for every thousand diapers I changed, I earned myself a week’s vacation (less true). Usually, these quips were amusing enough that no one delved deeper.
Still, I hated deceiving civilians, especially those I quickly grew to consider friends, and often, after I’d sussed them out, I’d reveal my true identity, like Spider-Man lifting his mask to Mary Jane—if slightly less exciting. Usually, people demonstrated little surprise. It never seemed much of a stretch, I suppose, for me to be, at one moment, a funny sort of traveler, and at the next a funny sort of professional traveler. For a second, the news might impress them, and they might remark on how awesome my job was, or even mention they’d read me, but soon they’d realize: Matt Gross was just Matt Gross, New York Times or not, for better or worse.
This is not, however, how Hannity reacted. I met Hannity (not his real name) outside Columbus, a small town on the American side of the New Mexico–Mexico border, during my cross-country Frugal Traveler road trip. Columbus was famous for two things: In 1916, it was raided by Pancho Villa’s forces, prompting a retaliation that included the first military deployment of airplanes. And partly because of this history, Columbus had become a mecca for hobbyist pilots, who lived together in compounds, their houses equipped with hangars that opened onto central runways.
After a few days in Columbus, wandering its history museum and crossing the border for street-taco dinners, I was anxious to find a pilot who could take me up in a plane. The owner of my $40-a-night bed-and-breakfast suggested Hannity, who lived not in a compound but in a trailer on a big, empty, dusty lot outside town. When I found him and broached the idea of going up in his ultralight, Hannity was amenable, although he noted it had been raining, and his runway was a little soft. If it didn’t rain overnight, though, we could go up the next morning.
Great, I said. Do you mind if I shoot some video while we’re airborne?
“Sure thing,” he said, then: “Wait. You’re not from the media, are you?”
Faced with such a direct question, I couldn’t lie. In less than a week, this video would soon be on the New York Times Web site, seen by hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions, and Hannity had a right to know what he was getting into. So I told him who I worked for.
“The New York Times?” he said. “Why, I’d just as soon shoot you as talk to you.”
Evidently, Hannity had a problem with the paper. Whether it was the Times’ political coverage or something else (t
he Times tends to attract cranks), I didn’t know, but I tried to explain things to him: what I was doing, which section I was writing for, my mission this summer—to stay off the interstates, see how people lived in different parts of the country, and save money. I offered to show him the Frugal Traveler site, and we moved into his trailer and turned on his satellite-Internet-linked computer. All the while, Hannity kept nodding and listening and not shooting me in the face, and I got the sense that, out here alone with the dust, his plane, and his dog, he craved company, even if it was that of a liberal New York Times writer.
After I’d explained myself for half an hour, Hannity relaxed. “If it doesn’t rain tonight,” he said, “be here at seven o’clock and we’ll go up.”
That night, it did not rain. At seven the next morning, I returned to Hannity’s plot, and he wheeled out his plane, a home-built ultralight consisting of hollow piping, PVC wings, and open cockpits. It weighed, Hannity said, about 250 pounds. It did not look all that sturdy, but I had to trust Hannity, even if Hannity did not trust the FAA, which he complained wanted too much oversight of rickety contraptions like the one he was just now firing up.
And then we were aloft! Cruising over the wide flat expanse of Columbus, tracing the line of the barrier fence between Mexico and the United States, arcing toward the low Florida Mountains in the shrinking distance. Up there, supported by so little, my face buffeted by winds, I had a sense of how big the planet was, and how open. I’d asked to go up, and my wish had been granted. Did other travelers know this was possible? Did other travelers know how simple this was? And could I communicate it to them in a way that would make sense?
These were the eternal questions of life as the Frugal Traveler, and as the years went on and the stories piled up they became ever more vexing, mostly because they were not the primary questions my column existed to answer. Instead, I had my frugal tips to discover, develop, and sometimes invent, but after dozens of articles I didn’t know quite how to come up with anything new. As I saw it, the way to travel frugally had been laid out sufficiently:
Air: Search Kayak.com, ITASoftware.com, and (for international flights) Vayama.com for low prices. Use AirfareWatchdog.com to set up alerts on routes you’d like to fly, and if those routes are to well-known destinations like Beijing or Rio de Janeiro, look into a U.S.-based consolidator, such as uschinatrip.com. Buy the ticket directly at the airline’s Web site whenever possible, and always join the loyalty program (and set up points-gaining credit cards; see cardratings.com for details). In Europe and Southeast Asia, fly low-cost carriers. Check in online. Be prepared to spend more than you want, and don’t complain too much.
Lodging: The cheapest option is to stay with friends, or friends of friends. The next cheapest is CouchSurfing.org, the international network of two million people willing (in principle) to give you their couches, floors, spare bedrooms, or guest cottages in exchange for no money whatsoever. (Yes, it’s safe.) Almost as cheap is WWOOF, but you must be willing to plan your vacation around farmwork. Next up are services like AirBnB.com, Roomarama.com, and Wimdu.com, which let you rent rooms, apartments, and whole houses around the world, like a user-friendly version of Craigslist. (Yes, they’re safe.) If you don’t trust these services, then you’ve got (in generally ascending order of expensiveness) hostels, motels, bed-and-breakfasts, inns, and real hotels. Again, join loyalty programs. Don’t take TripAdvisor too seriously. Never wire anyone any money (ever).
Food: Search Chowhound.com for recommendations, and Google your destination plus “food blog.” Buy ingredients at farmers’ markets, small grocery stores, and supermarkets—and taste every free sample. Really nice restaurants often have cheaper menus at lunch or at the bar. Eat a bigger lunch and a smaller dinner. Skip breakfast, unless it’s included with your room. Seek out church dinners. If you’re Jewish, seek out Chabad House for Sabbath dinners. If you’re hungry, seek out Sikh festivals. Eat street food. Eat fast food. Eat bad food.
Other: Use Skype. Go in the off season. Unlock your cell phone and buy local SIM cards. Find friends of friends (of friends) through Facebook. Buy citywide multimuseum passes, or skip museums and go to art galleries. Make sure your credit and ATM cards don’t charge foreign transaction fees. Take public transportation. Hitchhike, if it feels safe. Ride a bike. Walk.
So: There, in less than four hundred words, is everything you need to know about traveling cheaply—the sum total of my Frugal Tips, the material I spent four years, and hundreds of thousands of words, writing about in depth. To me, it all seemed so obvious, and repeating the same advice, week after week, in slightly different scenarios (today Paris, tomorrow Chiapas!) was maddening. Often, the advice boiled down to: You want to save money? Then just spend less, and care less. In a way, I felt like the copy editor I’d been at New York, only instead of offering the same grammatical and stylistic advice to the same writers every week, now I was giving readers the same money-saving travel tips they would have learned from me long ago, if only they’d been paying attention.
To be fair, every once in a while some new system or business would appear, and I’d jump on it. AirBnB.com, for instance, was only founded in 2008, and I wrote about it as soon as I could. But for the most part, I was recycling the same tips and techniques. Worse, I was getting jaded about the whole experience—about what was supposed to be the best job in the world—and I resented my audience even more bitterly for making me jaded. I wanted to be friendly and peppy, enthused about each new discovery, but instead I’d turned dark and sour. Why couldn’t I just enjoy myself?
Maybe because I felt I was failing to convey the subtleties of frugal travel. That is, none of my tips would mean anything to a traveler unless that traveler could prioritize. Would you sacrifice a four-star hotel room so you could afford three-star restaurants? Or would you subsist on Ritz crackers so you could stay at the Ritz Carlton? The answers, naturally, would vary from reader to reader, and depend on their level of travel experience. You don’t know what you truly care about as a traveler until you’ve traveled widely—by which time you’ve doubtless wasted lots of money on things you now realize you didn’t need or want. And those were things that I, as the everyman frugal traveler, couldn’t warn you about.
Moreover, as frugal tips came to dominate my thought process, I realized I didn’t give a damn about traveling frugally. Not that I wanted to go the luxury route, it was just that saving money was a secondary concern. Making friends, exploring unseen corners of the world, eating well, understanding how different people lived—those were the reasons I traveled, and the frugal aspect of it was just a means to that end.
But for too many of my readers, saving money was the goal of travel. Or it seemed that way. Maybe I was too sensitive, maybe I cared too much, but in comment after comment posted on the Frugal Traveler site, readers complained I was spending too much money, that I was doing things wrong, that they could do it better. I wanted to respond to them, “But it just doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter whether you save money or spend money. It’s how and why you travel that matters.” But that’s not the kind of thing the Frugal Traveler is expected to go around saying.
I tried to ignore the commenters, to dismiss them. Clearly, the naysayers were blindered idiots, convinced of their own skinflint greatness and oblivious to the broad range of travelers and interests I was attempting to appeal to. For them, frugal travel was about hostels, camping, supermarket meals—and nothing else. Their self-righteousness infuriated me, for I knew frugality carried no moral weight.
But the fans, too, bothered me. They’d praise a story, it seemed, solely because I’d visited the same place they’d been twenty years earlier; never mind that our experiences and insights utterly diverged, all they cared about was that I’d triggered their nostalgia of that Turkish honeymoon or that postgraduation Mexican backpacking trip.
I told myself and my friends I didn’t care what people said or wrote. “Embrace the hate,” Ted from Saigon, by then my friend and colleague
, told me again and again. But the truth is I cared. I wanted my audience to get what I was doing, and why, and to sign on to my nascent philosophy—to accept frugality as a mere premise, to open their eyes to the world it would unveil, and, ultimately, to cease thinking about money at all. And while some surely did, it was never enough. The high of publication was always followed by the low disappointment of feeling misunderstood.
Making this even worse was the guilt. I had, everyone agreed, the best job in the world, and yet all I could do was to look at the bleak side, to worry and moan over my failures, to discount the possibility that I might truly be helping people through my advice. What kind of ungrateful monster was I? Why did I deserve to travel constantly—and get paid for it, no less—while others scrimped and saved and waited for their once-in-a-lifetime shot at Paris?
Or maybe . . . Maybe I didn’t deserve it? I might not be fucking up as my editors once worried, but maybe someone else could do the job better, with more energy and dedication than I could muster after four years and two hundred stories. I wouldn’t, I knew, quit traveling or writing about travel completely, but I needed to get back to doing it how I wanted, focusing on what I felt was important: the unparalleled joy of bewilderment.
And so, as I had before and no doubt would do once again, I quit—while, I hoped, I was still ahead.
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*“How dare you call yourself the Frugal Traveler?” wrote a commenter named “Steve,” who said that in 1983 he and a friend had spent $6,400 (about $12,800 in 2006 dollars) on a six-month round-the-world trip. “Even with inflation your budget just for food and lodging is higher than that of the majority of American families vacations. We’ve been on several similar trips as recently as five years ago, without ever even approaching your bloated level of expenses. Shame on you, change your name to the Privileged Yuppie Traveler.”—Steve
