Meet the Nomads: Lara Dunston

I’ve been quietly following Lara and Terence’s blog for quite some time and I’m quite amazed with the number of places that they’ve been to. A couple of weeks back I was surprised to received an email from her regarding a tweet that I sent about my Top 15 Philippine Travel Blogs. I was ecstatic when she said that it introduced her to more travel blogs to the Philippines. I took the courage and asked her if I could feature her in Meet the Nomads and she graciously accepted my request.

This is by far one of the most engaging online interviews that I have ever done. Lara is a very talented writer and just by reading her response to my questions felt like I was transported to her living room listening to their travel stories.

Without further ado, here’s my short interview with Lara Dunston of Gran Turismo.

Wadi Rum, Jordan

How did you discover your passion for traveling?

“As child growing up in Sydney in the 1970s, I’d sit around my Russian grandparents’ dining table for Sunday lunches with the family and listen to my babouskha and papa tell stories about Russia, my uncles talk about their backpacking adventures in Asia and Europe, and my mother talk about living and working in Japan and Noumea. Combine that with five years travelling around Australia with my parents and I think it was inevitable that I’d develop a passion for travel.”

What’s the most horrible experience that you’ve had on the road?

“I’ve had some scary experiences. For instance, my heart was in my throat for the edge-of-the-seat ride on a mini-bus with other backpackers that hugged the hillside on the notorious ‘death road’ in Bolivia. I only felt some calm knowing that our bus was driven by a father whose young children and wife were sitting beside him – oh and the tranquilizers and cheap Bolivian bubbly also helped!”

What’s the best travel experience that you’ve ever had?

“The whole of 2010, for starters – the first Grantourismo project my photographer-husband Terence and I undertook in partnership with HomeAway Holiday Rentals, in which we traded hotels for holiday rentals for a year and lived like locals in places for two weeks a time. That was a very special adventure.

I also loved almost every moment of a one-year trip I did around South and Central America many years ago when researching Latin American cinema for my master’s degree on an itinerary dictated by film festivals. When I wasn’t watching films and interviewing filmmakers, I was backpacking around countries. The only moments I didn’t love were when I was missing Terence, who was running the design department of a publishing company in Australia and had to stay home and work. Terence and I have done some incredible trips together – the most memorable for me was probably a four-month trip driving around half of Australia, researching and photographing the Backroads Australia guidebook for Dorling Kindersley.

“Yep, this is what I call ‘work’ – live-tweeting a wine-tasting at the apartment we stayed at in Budapest for Grantourismo.” – Lara

What’s the biggest realization that you’ve got out of travelling?

That people are the best thing about a place, not the monuments and sights

– it really hit us a few years ago when we were working non-stop on magazine stories and flying into places to interview and photograph people and learning about what they do, and not doing many sights at all.

We realized that this was much more fun than ticking off every major sight and museum in a city, and that’s why we developed Grantourismo and our style of travel that we call ‘grand touring’, which involves travelling over extended periods of time, settling into places for a while, staying in rentals in everyday neighbourhoods rather than tourist areas, connecting with locals, immersing ourselves in the culture, learning things, and wherever we can, ‘giving back’ in some way to the places we’re staying in.”

What keeps you going? What keeps you motivated?

“When we travelled purely for pleasure, we didn’t find it all that tiring to be honest – apart from a trip Terence and I did backpacking around Mexico for a couple of months – the long bus rides combined with ‘Moctezuma’s Revenge’ saw us in bed (and in the bathroom!) for a few days on that trip. But now that we travel full-time and it’s all for work, yes, it is exhausting. On a recent trip around Thailand’s Isaan region for a magazine story, we were getting up in the dark and hitting the road between 4am and 6am so Terence could capture the Khmer ruins in their best light.

Then we’d be on the road all day, and then that evening we might be up late checking out eating options in the place and before we went to bed Terence would be downloading and backing up photos and I’d be doing research, planning the following day’s travel, and answering emails about other projects. What keeps us going is the fact that we love our work. We love getting to know places and cultures, meeting the people that make them special, and then telling the world about them in our stories and photographs.”

This is a silly and hypothetical one. If you would be given a chance to travel with a popular person or a celebrity, who would it beand why?

“The travel writer, Paul Theroux – but Terence would have to come too! I remember the first time we discovered Theroux’s work – it was The Pillars of Hercules, about his Mediterranean travels. We were travelling around the Mediterranean at the time – doing a trip through Italy, then across southern France to Spain and Portugal. Terence read the book first, and would read out bits, and then I read it straight after him, and then Terence re-read bits again! We loved the way Theroux travelled so spontaneously and that encounters with people were central to his journeys and that inspired us. Terence and I were in Italy on a train and we’d decided to give Pisa a miss, as it had a bad reputation as being too touristy, but when the train was there at the station, we looked at each other – how could we miss Pisa, our looks said – and we just jumped off the train at the last minute.

It was the best decision we ever made! It was early evening and Pisa was just lovely after the tour buses had moved on – we wandered the streets, which were empty and quiet, except for Italian cadet soldiers from a nearby base flirting with girls. We ate pizza in a simple family eatery. We loved it. We took Pillar of Hercules on many subsequent trips around the Mediterranean, including Turkey, Greece and Croatia, and from then on we’d seek out books by Theroux on places we were travelling to. It would be great to have the man himself accompany us on a trip!”

Where’s your favourite place on this planet and why?

“People ask us that question every day, but I don’t have one single favourite place. If I did, I probably wouldn’t be travelling constantly and would actually live in a proper home somewhere. I have a dozen favourite places where I could easily live for a while. Bangkok, where we’ve been based for almost three months, and my other favourite Asian city is Tokyo, which we fell in love with on our Grantourismo trip last year. I’m besotted with Venice, although I’m smitten with the whole of Italy to be honest – the food, the culture, the people – but if I had to pick one Italian city to live in for a while it would be Rome. I have the same feelings about Spain – for the same reasons too – and have always found it tough to choose between Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastian. Buenos Aires is another big favourite – we almost bought an apartment there – and I’ve always been a big fan of Mexico City, and am fond of Rio de Janeiro too.

The Middle East was our base from 1998 until we took to the road full-time in 2006, and Dubai and Abu Dhabi were our homes and will always have a special place in my heart – Damascus, Beirut, Istanbul and Marrakech are my favourite cities in the region. And back in Europe, Antwerp, Brussels, Amsterdam and Zurich are all cities I could return to again and again and could easily settle in for a while.”

Lara setting the table outside their trullo – traditional Puglian house – that they stayed at in southern Italy for their Grantourismo project

What’s your best tip for newbie travellers?

“Take things slowly, don’t try to see and do everything at once. Instead of trying to see 20 countries in 30 days, focus on one instead, enroll in some language classes, make local friends. Before we became full-time writers, and after we gave up publishing/film careers in Australia and moved to the Middle East so I could accept an academic job, we had almost three months holiday a year, two months in summer, plus two weeks in winter, and loads of other long weekends for Islamic holidays. We would fly off to Middle East cities like Beirut, Damascus, Muscat, etc, for long weekends. For winter, we’d go to Switzerland, France or Germany so Terence could go snowboarding, and for our two-month summer break we’d focus just on two countries for a month each: France and Spain, Turkey and Greece, Croatia and Italy, etc. It was that immersion in places that enabled us to develop the in-depth knowledge about places that helped us develop our careers as travel writers.

First-time travelers shouldn’t try to do everything at once – they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. My advice: spread your travels out over 40 years instead! Trust me, staying longer and settling into places, especially when you rent apartments instead of staying in hostels or hotels, is a far more rewarding way to travel than flitting through places ticking off sights.”

What’s the funniest and silliest thing you’ve ever done while travelling?

“You’d have to ask Terence that question! I wouldn’t say I was clumsy, nor am I absent-minded like a couple of friends who will remain nameless, but I occasionally have my moments, especially when we’re at airports or train stations, when I do these kooky things that result in slapstick moments. Terence will say: “are you working on one of your comedy routines?” But being physical comedy, I’ll spoil the moments by describing them to you. You’ve got to see them for yourself – maybe when we come to the Philippines! – or maybe you’ll have to get Terence to secretly film one of my ‘routines’.”

What do you think about yourself?

“Unfortunately I don’t have much time for self-reflection these days… okay, so there you go: um, I’m busy, I’m over-committed, I can’t say ‘no’ to work, so we always have far too much to do. I’m not as good at time-management as I once was (probably because there’s simply too much to manage), so I work long hours. I’m definitely hardworking but I love my work, so in a way it’s not work at all. But given the chance, I’ll play hard too. Terence and I are the same, so we can be dangerous together – very few people can drink us under a table! We love music and will happily stay up until the wee hours watching bands and hopping between jazz bars and live gigs.

I think my best qualities are probably my open-mindedness, my empathy and my tolerance, I always see all sides of things and try to understand people and their situation and why they do the things they do. My worst quality? Intolerance and impatience. I have no time for people who are intolerant – especially those who are racist – who are ignorant and who are close-minded.”

Grantourismo is a place for us to write about our preferred style of travel that we call ‘grand touring’, which simply involves travelling over extended periods, settling into places for some time, engaging with locals, immersing ourselves in places, and learning things. We blog there about our projects – the first was a one-year round-the-world trip with HomeAway Holiday Rentals, which we recently finished – and in between projects, we blog about our experiences and the things that interest us and they fall under the themes of local travel or living like locals, slow and sustainable travel, experiential travel, and the idea of ‘giving back’ when we travel.

I also have a little much-neglected blog called Cool Travel Guide that was a place for me to write about the things that I found cool (and not so cool) about travel, the people we met and the places we went to, and my work as a travel writer. I hope to re-launch that soon.”

Photo Credits: Pics by Lara Dunston

Next: Mike and Luci of 1000 Fights. Previously: Leif Harum of The Runaway Guide. For more interviews with travel bloggers, check out the archives of Meet the Nomads.