Top travel jobs: Been there, reported that
By Jayne Clark, USA TODAY
Freestone, Calif. - On a flawless Northern California day, Don George is zipping through the winding back roads of Sonoma wine country. The top is down on his 13-year-old BMW, and dappled sunlight glances off his face as it dances through towering roadside redwoods.
All appears right with the world, but truth be told, George faces a professional dilemma: Will he get the two-hour or the four-hour spa treatment?
In the end, he goes for the lengthier Ultimate Enzyme Bath at the Japanese-flavored Osmosis Day Spa, which includes a massage, a facial, a bath and some "om" time in the Zen garden out back. He gamely doffs his clothes and climbs into a fermenting cauldron of cedar powder, Douglas fir, rice bran and plant enzymes.
He looks, well, ridiculous. But for a travel writer, reporting isn't just about listening and observing. It's also about experiencing. And George is just doing his job.
As the rather grandly titled Global Travel Editor of Lonely Planet, George writes and edits books for the guidebook publisher, oversees a monthly newspaper column and fields traveler questions in a weekly online column, "What Would Don George Do?"
After post-college stints in Paris, Athens and Tokyo, George, 52, landed his first travel reporting job at the San Francisco Examiner, where he remained for 15 years. In 1995, he transferred his skills to online travel sites. Thus far, he has visited 66 or so countries and can't think of a place he wouldn't return to.
"I've never really had a bad trip," he says. "When things go wrong, I find that it leads to something interesting. The train never arrived, so you ended up sharing a taxi and the itinerary changes."
He has traveled to the exotic (the Galapagos Islands tops that list). And to the paradisiacal (untouristy Aitutaki in the Cook Islands is his latest discovery). So it might seem a tad ironic that George finds the best stories from trips in which things do go wrong. And some of the most memorable places are also, as he euphemistically terms it, the most "challenging." Like Calcutta, where grinding poverty assaults the senses but can spark self-discovery.
At the spa, George emerges from hours of being soaked and scoured and soothed, an experience he'll later write was akin to "feeling like my senses and soul have been scrubbed clean."
Then he's back in his car, winding along the California coast, the silver shimmer of the sea merging with blue sky. He raises his face sunward, inhales the salt air, and with a grin as broad as the horizon, declares, "Few people can say that they love what they do, and few
