Posts Tagged ‘travel and journalism’
VIDEO: Travel + Journalism in Burma
This video is the story of the time I spent in Burma. I went there in February 2015. I went there to travel and to do journalism. I wanted to see if I could combine the experience of traveling with the challenge of trying to find stories. As a freelancer, trying to travel and hunt down stories while you do so is a fun challenge. This was my first experiment trying to do that.
The benefits of traveling in this way are many. One of these is that you travel in a different way, as you try to get beneath the surface and look deeper than you might normally do. You also meet people, from locals to intrepid expats. The other big benefit of course is financial, as stories you find and sell helps to offset the money you spent traveling.
The video was shot using a Canon S120 and edited in Windows Movie Maker.
Related:
- Burmese Days — this is the written companion to the video above
- How I learned to love life and reporting again while in Burma
- After Burma, now I’m broke
The CNN article mentioned in the video is here.
The previous video I made is: A Year In The Life of a Freelance Journalist Abroad
Burmese Days
I hadn’t done much reading or planning before I went to Burma. I had a very rough idea of where I’d travel to, but nothing was laid out — these days I don’t even book accommodation. For some reason I thought I’d take a month for Burma, which is far too long. I spent 18 days there in the end.
It was February when I went, a cold and damp month in Beijing. I left the city at night, on my way to the airport, sleet falling on my face, two days after Chinese new year. I remember that I was feeling a little down, for wintry reasons.
Trepidation was accompanying me. The country was an unknown, a chasm only to be filled in by retrospect.
Let’s talk about these “digital nomads”
Recently, I’ve seen a few articles describing a new trend. They’re about so-called digital nomads. They are people who travel the world, jetting from one place to another, doing work that requires simply a good WiFi connection. They might be web designers, graphics artists, app developers, or freelance writers.
What they do is location independent, not needing to punch into an office. Some do like shared office spaces, in Bali for instance. Many are freelancers. And all they need is a computer and the Internet to communicate and to transfer the work. They don’t make huge amounts of money because it’s freedom they prioritize. Southeast Asia is a hub for these nomads because this region is cheap, well-connected when you want to move on, from Vietnam to Thailand say, but still possessing coffee and WiFi.
I’ve never tried this kind of lifestyle. I work from Beijing, from where I contribute China-related journalism to various publications around the world. Sometimes they are articles that aren’t contingent on the fact I’m based in China. This is an example — I could have written that from anywhere in the world. Journalism isn’t a hugely well paid gig, especially when you’re freelance. I’ve mentioned numerous times how living in China helps as things are cheaper here, but, the truth is, Beijing, and the many enjoyments it offers, makes it only slightly better in that regard.
How I learned to love reporting (and life) again while in Burma
At Inle lake, March 3rd. A great strawberry shake can be found up the road from Remember Inn.
I’ve been in Burma now for 12 days and I am writing this post from Rangoon, the country’s commercial capital and largest city, and my end destination.
I traveled from Mandalay, where I touched down from China, then I went via slow boat to Bagan, a place filled with hundreds of pagodas dotted along a picturesque landscape, before heading to Inle lake to meet an interviewee.
I am hoping to meet two journalists living here in Rangoon who are around my age. Joshua Carroll, a British freelancer, and Catherine Trautwein, an American who writes for The Myanmar Times.
Along the way I have enjoyed the sunshine and warmth of the climate and the people. It is an immense relief to be away from Beijing, away from the cramped conditions of mind and body that was the prison of overly WiFi’d Beijing.
Here I’ve been able to relax, and to practice slow journalism. Sitting at temples, cafés and restaurants, waiting for a local to come talk to me or just observing what’s around and in front of me. Picking up kernels of story ideas or pouncing when one comes along, changing schedules on the fly.
Being on the road without the distractions of Internet and social media (Internet is quite patchy in Burma) has meant I’ve been writing more in longhand, a welcome change of pace.
I might head to Vietnam after but I have not yet made up my mind. All this travel and the money spent on it I hope to recoup by selling the stories I am picking up along the way, but it is risky as I am not certain they will sell.
But the momentum of travel, the sensation of discovery, new people and new places brings you alive, shaking off the chill of a dark winter. It has been a great tonic.
An update on North Korea: the costs of freelancing from the Hermit Kingdom
So I traveled in late April to North Korea for a week. I wrote about it on this blog here. The trip, all inclusive, was through a Beijing-based tour company (tourism to NK is only permissible via these tour operators), and it cost me 1100 euros.
A North Korean greeter from the port of Nampo. Copyright: Lu-Hai Liang (2014).
It was a significant outlay. 1100 euros (875 British pounds or 1448 US dollars) is a lot of money and I dug into my overdraft to stump up the cash. Yes, I did want to go anyway, but I knew I would have to find ways to recoup the costs. How would I do that? By selling stories based on my trip of course. I am a freelance foreign correspondent after all.
However, at the time, I hadn’t been commissioned for anything. No editor at any newspaper, website or magazine was expecting Korea-related copy from me. This is, in short, not the way to do things.
A freelance should really have stories already booked in before s/he travels. And then he does more research and maybe pitches one or two more. After he comes back from said travel and has filed his commissioned stories, he digs around his head and thinks up further angles.
At the least, you should recoup what it cost; all the expenses that it took to go. For North Korea, I have not yet done that. I have in fact paid off 79% of the 1100 euros I spent.
This comes from three sources: a profile of a manager of one of these NK tour companies; an investigative feature on the growth of North Korean tourism; and a photo gallery.
The profile was published online by The Telegraph, and fetched me 150 pounds. Al Jazeera published both the feature and photo gallery, and the two together was worth $900 (both items each making up half that number).
The photo gallery was a useful reminder of how to diversify. If you have video or photos, it always pays to ask your editor if they want an edited together video or a photo gallery. Always ask if they’ll pay for it though – never believe your stuff should be free!
I haven’t yet pitched anything revolving around something like a travel narrative on my experiences traveling in North Korea, but that’s quite hard. It’s already been done quite a bit, so I’ll have to come up with a unique angle. But it’s good practice for next time, and for future trips. Travel + journalism is fun, yo.
Links:
Is North Korea On Your Tourism Bucket List? – Aljazeera (includes photo gallery)
Traveling + Writing
China is big. Very big. Asia – or East Asia to be more precise, is bigger still. It includes the economic powerhouses of Japan and South Korea. It includes the cultural stew and rapid developments of south-east Asia, of which Indonesia is the most feted. It includes the basket case of North Korea and the fortress of Burma.
One of the draws of being based in Beijing was the relative ease of traveling to all these exciting locations. In the reality, the distances and airfares involved in flying around Asia is not so convenient. But still, I have spent the past week in the idylls that are Thailand’s islands.
Originally my plans were to incorporate travel & journalism – to go somewhere and experience the country while digging up stories, interviewees and new angles. It was a very appealing idea.
This time I didn’t do that. I just wanted to relax. It was a very valuable vacation. I read, wrote and jotted down notes and ideas, scraps of articles and blogs while sipping on a coconut, mango and lassi shake. I wrote the intro for an article, this blog, and wrote down a couple of pitches in detail, and jotted down ideas for others.
Sometimes, a holiday is exactly what you need to refresh the freelancing imagination…
In Koh Lanta, Thailand.
Lu-Hai Liang 