Travel writing is easy

Because I track so many volunteer blogs in Cameroon it is easy to spot the patterns.

The most frequent one is simply the long pause.

And then the following staple post:

Sorry, I haven’t blogged in so long – I guess I just found it hard to find something to write about. My life might still seem incredible to someone just arriving here but it’s already become routine to me.

It’s true – after you’ve been here a while you have to step outside yourself just to realise how bizarre you life has become.

But I think there is another reason why people run out of words.

A lot of it is down to what I have started to call the cliché and the anti cliché.

The cliché is that Africa is poor, hungry and miserable – the anti cliché is that people here have very little but are happy and that they want for nothing and it’s those rich nations that have it wrong.

It’s actually that anti cliché that’s most widespread especially amongst short termers and new arrivals.

But, in time, you realise that neither view point is right and, as ever, nothing is as simple as it seems.  Of course the longer you stay anywhere the more you understand.

However the more you learn the more you realise how little you know.

And after a while you have a part of you invested in that country. You realise the”poor but happy” line is naive and insensitive and yet you don’t want to be overly critical of the country that is so generously hosting you.

Because in a little over six months here I haven’t met a person I didn’t like. I’ve been treated with remarkable kindness and a great deal of warmth.

And it’s hard to betray that with critical words.

That’s where the title to this blog post comes in. Travel writing, in comparison, must be easy. How straight forward it must be to roll into town and to describe all you see. A little research may add some context to your words but they needn’t be clouded by potentially contradictory words from different groups of local people.

There’s no one to upset and no one to betray.

But for the long termer, now too aware to use either the cliché or the anti cliché, it becomes harder. Knowing more than most – but not nearly enough – makes it so much more difficult to write about a place.

Even simply saying what you see without commentary can soon become repetitive.