Free Road Fever by Tim Cahill

targets of opportunity include various ministries of tourism or national parks administrations worldwide. Companies that manufacture beer or cigarettes sometimes sponsor expeditions. There is a growing market for professionally produced videos shot in exotic locations.
    Alternately, a writer, photographer, or video artist approaches an airline, generally a foreign carrier—for instance, Garuda, out of Indonesia—and offers to document the beauties of, say, Java. Garuda assumes that the project—a photo essay, film, or article—will appear in the United States and inspire tourists to fly to Java on Garuda.
    There is a obvious problem here. The essence of travel is discovery, and if you are going to Java for the first time, you have no idea whether it’s your kind of place. Java could be a hellhole—I’ve been there, it isn’t—and, having been financed by Garuda, you are obligated to expound on the island’s beauty.
    Consequently, I finance my own travels so that I don’t feel obligated to write glowing accounts of destinations that I may find dismal or dull or desperate. This policy makes me feel upright, even sanctimonious, so I should hasten to add that picking the source of your OPM is also good business for someone who wants to stay in the low-rent travel biz. Write too many puff pieces out of the Sheraton and editors begin to doubt your commitment to the truth.
    My travel money comes from magazine assignments or advances on books. Any extended stay usually requires that I piggyback assignments. An airline magazine doesn’t usually pay well, but tickets are considered part of an article fee. Since I spend a lot of time at my destination walking around with a pack on my back and eating gummy freeze-dried dinners, airline fees are often my largest single expense. With a ticket to some exotic location in hand, I can approach any number of magazines and propose a story. (Magazines, sad to say, are not nearly so free with expense money as most people think.) Pitching my stories—gorillas in Africa, lost cities in Peru, river running in India, drunken diving for poison sea snakes in the Philippines—is important, of course, but editors can sell almost any project to their financial officers if it looks like a bargain. An author also needs a fairly respectable track record in such endeavors. Virtually no one will issue expenses to an unpublished writer.
    “All I need,” I tell an editor, “is in-country expenses.” Sometimes,I’ll pile another article on top of that, consulting with editors at three magazines to be sure that the stories I want to do don’t conflict. A three-story piggyback, in my experience, is good for a couple of months’ worth of hard traveling.
    I do not take junkets provided for travel writers. A junket is a tour group and that is all. People on junkets never get to go anywhere interesting. They stay in four-star hotels and end up in the bar talking to the other travel writers about previous junkets.
    Given my profession, such as it is, I am constantly reading between the lines of the most recent adventure or travel book: how did the author finance this saga? Do we have an airline ticket scam here, a generous book advance, an articles piggyback, a cigarette company advertising expedition? Some journeys are clearly self-financed and they often result in the best books. A tight budget is the mother of adventure. It generates tense situations, confrontations with unsavory characters, hysterical desperation, and uncomfortable sleeping arrangements.
    Self-financed travel books are generally written by previously unpublished writers driven by an immense love of the subject matter and a deep desire to prove that every editor who turned down the initial proposal is an idiot. Sometimes, reading a particularly good travel-writing debut, I can hear the sound of disembodied and distant applause as editors all over New York slap their foreheads in chagrin. But editors are not complete idiots, and if