Planning a trip? Go book

Why hire a tour guide when there are so many good travel publications? Mark Tjhung talks to journalist Rahul Jacob about the globetrotter’s best companion

Rahul Jacob sits forward on a Pacific Coffee Company sofa and, with a soft eloquence, speaks about travel. ‘[Today], everyone wants to be seen as a traveller and not as a tourist. But when we are more truthful with ourselves, we are tourists. We don’t have the luxury of time that people did 50 years ago.’


Books can offer even greater insight into cities than being there

To some extent, Jacob is a defender of mass tourism, and having grown up in Kolkata he feels an affinity with many an Asian adventurer. But if he doesn’t call himself a traveller, he’s not your average tourist either. Since 2003, he has been the travel, food and drink editor at the Financial Times broadsheet in London. The job that is his passion has taken him to the four corners of the Earth, making him exceptionally well travelled – suffi ciently so to have a book published about his journeys.

His debut publication, Right of Passage: Travels from Brooklyn to Bali, is a collection of his FT travelogues and columns published since he took up the glamorous-sounding position. ‘[Most of the time] I’m chained to my computer in London…it’s not as glamorous as it sounds,’ Jacob assures me. One of his central themes is the difference between travelling today and travelling 50 or 100 years ago. Obviously, he acknowledges the emergence of mass tourism, and the revolution in accommodation and transportation. But perhaps the major difference, one that he says is a ‘huge distinction to travelling 50 years ago’, is in the way literature can complement the travelling experience.

It’s an outlook that has inspired a chapter in his book – ‘Close Encounters’ – dedicated to his meetings with some of the finest authors of our time, such as Joan Didion, Yann Martel and Vikram Seth. ‘Most of us reading in English 50 years ago read a canon of books. Having grown up in India, I was brought up on certain middlebrow books, like Wodehouse, to more highbrow stuff. Whereas today, one would be reading everything from Marquez, if you’re going to South America, to Pamuk if you’re going to Istanbul.’ Today, where luxurious, extended adventures are not the norm, Jacob believes literature is the key to a far more evocative [travel] experience. ‘The only way that you’re going to get inside [a foreign culture], or as much as an outsider ever can, is if you read [for example] Rushdie when you go to India. I spent four days in Istanbul…but learned more about Istanbul from [Pamuk’s The Black Book] than I did from wandering around.’

As he continues, Jacob recalls, with enthusiastic nostalgia, passages that most significantly affected him, underlining the unique qualities that local writers can offer. ‘In his memoirs, [Pamuk talks about his] memories of a place, and he has a whole chapter about the mindset of Istanbul, which he calls the “hüzün” [“melancholy”]. The entire chapter is him setting out how he sees this melancholy side to the city, from the bridges to the women carrying their fish in old newspapers to what it looks like on a winter’s night when the smog is coming. That chapter is so rich in experience. It’s so important to read books like that that are written by a city’s foremost writer based on experiences over decades.’

Indeed, as Jacob wrote in a recent article about Palermo, the former Fortune magazine writer believes that ‘all great cities need great books about them – a soundtrack to the drama of urban life’. And, having spent many years in Hong Kong as the Financial Times’ bureau chief, he has no hesitation when asked about the fragrant harbour’s finest literary companion. ‘Jan Morris. It’s just called Hong Kong. I describe [Morris] as writing in 3-D. She brings Hong Kong alive…and what [her book] managed to skip altogether was the gloomy prognostication of Hong Kong’s future during the handover period... In a way, it becomes timeless. I think Morris’ book is like eating lots and lots of Peking duck. There are so many images that it’s indigestible. You can’t read it all from end to end.’

If anyone can employ an analogy like this, it’s a travel, food and drink editor.

Read the full interview with Rahul Jacob at www.timeout.com.hk.