Simon Calder is one of the UK’s most well-known travellers, having edited The Independent Traveller for 13 years and presented several BBC travel shows. Known as 'the man who pays his way', Simon's travels have taken him from Crawley to Mount Kenya, and always in the 'cheap seat'. Simon came to our store in Covent Garden to record a pilot radio show with our very own general manager, Andrew Steed. Simon stopped for a chat about his travels with our web editor Rachel Ricks…
People may or may not know that you moved from security guard to travel editor – how did you do that?
Well, the main thing I think is just to be interested in travelling – that’s all that I’ve ever wanted to do. Probably the fact that I was born in Crawley helped convince me of that. I worked at Gatwick Airport in a number of capacities: frisking people – that was a job, not a hobby. I then cleaned out planes for the great Sir Freddy Laker and Laker Airways. I then cleaned out the offices of British Airtours which was a kind of predecessor, in a sense, of a low-cost airline.
It’s a fascinating business, travel, but I then spent 15 years as an engineer and then in one of those strange twists of fate – all I was doing was just feeding my travel habit and doing lots of work, lots of writing, just trying to earn enough to go off travelling, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do – and suddenly I got a job at The Independent and I’m still baffled as to how exactly that happened.
How did you fine-tune your brilliant writing style?
That’s extremely kind of you. I don’t really know much about writing or books or literature or anything like that because I’m really a mathematician by training and an engineer by profession. So you just, I guess, make it up as you go along and I suppose the thing that every travel writer should have is an inbuilt cliché detector. If you start finding yourself writing, 'Majorca: an island of contrast'...then throw it away and start again!
Any further tips you’d give to budding travel writers?
I would go and buy the very good Lonely Planet Travel Writing book. It’s a masterful assessment of the market, which is the main thing. We welcome at The Independent all submissions for the travel pages, but if somebody sends me 8,000 words on Uzbekistan, well that’s great, I’m glad you had a lovely, interesting time, but quite frankly, 1,300 words on Venice is going to be nearer the mark. So just have a look at what the market is – whether it’s magazines like Conde Nast Traveller, Wanderlust, whether it’s any of the national newspapers – see what they do and then pitch ideas that will fit those, rather than going off writing something, which may well be brilliant, but for which sadly there may not be a market.
Do you still really enjoy travelling or does it always feel like work?
My goodness me, what could be better than going round the world on holiday pretending to work – I can’t think of anything better! It’s great, and the world is such a huge, diverse, wonderful place, that I’m just trying to get to as many places as I possibly can before I have to hand in my passport.
With everywhere you have been, how do you decide what you want to write a guidebook about? Do you plan it before you set off?
It’s all to do with markets; the first book I wrote was the “Hitchhikers Manual Britain”, and that was in the olden days when people used to hitchhike, but there wasn’t a guide available, so that obviously met a market. Then I did “Traveller’s Survival Kit Cuba”, I just did that because there wasn’t a guidebook to Cuba, so that was actually quite easy. And in those days you could go round Cuba, writing about every single restaurant, hotel and shop and just put them all in because there were so few of them. Now it’s a bit more complicated, which is a jolly good thing if you happen to be Cuban.
You’re known as ‘the man who pays his way’; surely you get tempted to take an extravagant taxi ride or get a free stay in a luxury hotel?
No, no, no. It’s very inconvenient – especially for my bank balance, paying my own way – but it’s got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. When I started [at The Independent] in 1994, it was very expensive – if you wanted to fly to Rome, you were talking about a minimum of £200, now you can get there for 80 quid if you time it right. And the good thing about being a travel editor is you can pretend to be working at all times and travel on a wet Tuesday in November, which is the cheapest time to get there.
In terms of accommodation, I do not properly understand luxury hotels. I’m delighted that some people like them and I think that they are a very good thing, and how fantastic that people can stay in them, but frankly hostels are much more interesting – you get a much better class of people – lots of people with lots of stories. And furthermore, if you’re paying for it yourself, well it’s jolly convenient to pay £10 a night instead of £200.
What’s the worst journey you’ve had?
Nowhere that I can think of where I’ve just thought, ‘Oh my goodness me, this is never going to end’ or, ‘I’m in big trouble here’. Quite basically I’m too scared – I don’t want to go off and do anything actually dangerous. So the worst journey is probably something ludicrous like earlier this year, flying from Dubai to Heathrow and the plane landed at Heathrow and then the captain said, ‘By the way, you can’t get off here, we’re going to have to fly you to Gatwick instead.’ So after eight hours on this plane, they told us that the curfew was going to be coming in at Heathrow so we had to fly to Gatwick. It then took an extra hour because there were problems there and we eventually landed in the middle of the night at an airport we didn’t want to be at, having been the evening before at an airport we did want to be at. But my goodness me, if that’s the worst thing that can happen, well then I’m jolly well fortunate.
And the worst place you’ve stayed?
Oh my goodness me, the Hotel Karaja in Albania. I’m on a bit of a crusade to come up with the world’s great cheap hotels – £10 a night is pretty good and there’s some great places in the Balkans – in Belgrade, the Star Hostel, £7 a night including breakfast and all the cigarette smoke you can inhale, Athens Youth Hostel, again 10 euros a night (seven quid) – fantastic. Whereas the Hotel Karaja, which is 20 euros a night, is simply the foulest, dirtiest, coldest place I’ve ever been in my life. Luckily I got in there about nine at night and I had to get up at three in the morning to fly out from Mother Teresa international airport and my goodness me, I’ve never been so glad to leave a place. So definitely, Hotel Karaja in Tirana – avoid it like the plague. And if you are the manager of the Hotel Karaja, do feel free to sue me – I’ve got the pictures!
On your website, you state that your favourite bus ride is the number 11 from Liverpool Street to World’s End in London – why?
Yes because it goes through the heart of one of the great cities in the world, and what could be better than being on the top deck of a bus that is drifting past all this wonderful architecture, these historic places – it’s fantastic. And if you’ve got an Oyster card, it’s only 90 pence as well – bargain!
What do you do on an average weekend?
I’m a tourist! I live in London, which is a great tourist destination, and I just go around doing tourist things – it’s great. And I think, 'Oh dear this is so tough – I’m having to work, going to the National Gallery, eating and drinking in restaurants and bars. Oh it’s a tough old life, but someone has to do it!'
Are you introducing your daughters to the joys of travel?
Yes I think so. It’s funny, I don’t really go back to the same place often. There are exceptions – I’m lucky enough to keep going back to Paris, Nice, Amsterdam, Rome and all those places that we just go to try to find new angles to them, but mostly I don’t return to places. But Daisy and Poppy just love San Sebastian in northern Spain – and that’s the only place they want to go to, so we go there a lot. But I suppose they find it joyful, yes I think everyone probably finds travel joyful these days – it’s so easy, so cheap, such fun.
Where could you go back to over and over again?
I don’t know. The place where I get off a plane and I just think, 'Oh I feel completely at home', is Mexico, very oddly – I don’t know why. I’ve been lucky enough to go to Mexico quite a lot and it’s maybe just the way that people are so friendly, engaging, everything’s possible, everything’s easy, nobody gets too stressed, whether you’re in the middle of Mexico City or in the wilds of the Yucatan, it’s just lovely. Really easy hitching, really everything’s just a laugh, so I feel very comfortable there, and keep going back there. But there’s just so many places to go, and look at all these maps you’ve got in this fantastic office [the web office at Stanfords!] – there’s just loads of places that I’ve never ever been to, I’m just desperate to go to them rather than places I’ve already been to.
Is there anywhere you haven’t been that you’d like to?
I’ve been lucky enough in the past few weeks to have been to Ethiopia, which I’ve always wanted to go to – quite a tough destination I must say – and Kenya, where I climbed Mount Kenya. Well that’s not strictly true – I climbed the third highest bit of Mount Kenya, which isn’t quite the same, but there we are. I want to go to Nepal, which I’ve embarrassingly never been to. Tanzania, the Middle East, Central Asia… it’s just pathetic the number of places I haven’t been to and I’m doing my best to try and tick them off.
What – or where – is next? Any plans to write another book?
Books are tricky, I mean they’re great fun to do, but they just demand so much time, so much energy.
What’s happening at The Independent, I’m pleased to say with the involvement of Stanfords, we’re going off in different directions, we’re trying to apply the values of the Independent traveller to, for example, radio. We’ve come up with a radio programme which is run in conjunction with Stanfords. We’re also going into television so that ‘48 Hours’, which has been going for eight million years as The Independent’s city break series, is now available in video. So those are really exciting developments.
It’s an interesting business, the newspaper business – not the most profitable one in the world, so you just have to keep ahead of the game; whether or not we’re doing that is not for me to say, but I can say we are honestly trying our best.
The radio programme – Something to Declare – can be heard on The Independent Travel website.
Find out more about Simon on his website: www.simoncalder.com and The Independent Travel website: http://travel.independent.co.uk
Author: Rachel Ricks
Date: 4 December 2007