As the Frugal Traveler at the New York Times’ Travel section, a position he’s held for over two years, 34-year old Matt Gross has criss-crossed the globe from Bucharest to Taipei. Before scoring this gig, Gross had been a news editor at Foxnews.com and then an assistant editor at New York, a job he left to travel around Cambodia and Vietnam for five months. Now he’s the consummate global nomad, spending three months on the road every summer. This year, he focused on Europe, stopping in 16 countries for a series of articles he called “The New Grand Tour.” Senior Editor Hannah Wallace caught up with Gross last month in Brooklyn.
Hannah: What was the first Frugal Traveler story you wrote for the New York Times?
Matt: Frugal Newport Rhode Island. See, you laugh. That was the whole idea. When my editors explained the Frugal Traveler to me they said the joke has to be in the headline. Frugal, somewhere obviously expensive.
Hannah: But they are not always that way.
Matt: It’s mutated on beyond that. But the goal is still to do an expensive place cheaply or to seek out comfortable luxuries or experiences on a budget wherever you are, still trying to be comfortable but not spend a bunch of money.
Hannah: How many months, on average, are you traveling each year?
Matt: In 2007 I was away for 6 months out of the year. 2006 I was away at least 5. This year I’ve tried to slow down. (Gross and his wife, Jean, are pregnant.) If all goes well, it will be a max of about 4 months.
Hannah: That’s still a lot, but at least it’s not all at once. You come back to Brooklyn in between trips.
Matt: Well there’s this whole three month thing over the summer. It’s always a Grand Tour. I call it the “Epic Summer Mega Trip.”
Hannah: And your budget for this trip is 100 Euros a day?
Matt: That was the ceiling. The idea was to shoot for less than that.
Hannah: How on earth did you do that?
Matt: In some ways it was really difficult and in some ways it was really easy.
Hannah: Some travel magazines would say that’s impossible to do—without sleeping in train stations, that is.
Matt: It’s totally possible but you have to think about what your priorities are, what’s worth spending money on to you. Is having a shmancy hotel room the most important thing to you or is having really excellent meals really important?
Hannah: You never really stayed at luxury hotels, as far as I can tell—or did you? There was the one in Cyprus, but that wasn’t that expensive.
Matt: It was beautiful, but it didn’t cost much at all. I can’t remember the price but I think it was about $60-75 USD a night, which is really not bad for a pristine, isolated, beautiful hotel.
Hannah: I guess word of mouth is key, but also living like a local—which you do really well.
Matt: I went to this Oasis hotel in northern Cyprus because I’d heard about it from a couple different people and I had this hand drawn map that someone had made for me that pointed it out and I thought, OK, well this seems like a good place to try out. I mean all I knew was that it was on this peninsula I was trying to get to, it looked like it was on the beach and I would probably be able to afford it because these people knew that I was hitchhiking and it wasn’t going to be an expensive place. I got there and it’s just gorgeous. It’s eight rooms. The water is heated by solar panels and the food is great and the staff is really lovely and know how to deal with the menagerie of Westerners and Turks and Greeks who pass through. It was lovely. It had a great restaurant and then I discovered it’s the Lonely Planet Cyprus’ writer’s favorite hotel in the entire island.
Hannah: You made a point of not looking at guide books and magazines.
Matt: I made an incidental point of it. It was only towards the end of the trip that I realized I hadn’t brought a guide book with me at all. I never even thought about bringing a guide book.
Hannah: Is that the way you usually travel?
Matt: Sometimes I bring one just to have reference information. If I don’t know where I’m going to wind up, it’s just worth having a list of hotels or something. And then it turns out I never look at it. On my Cross Country Road Trip last year, I brought Road Trip USA and these big guide books and they just stayed at the bottom of my bag…
Hannah: Is that because you find all that stuff anyways through the people that you meet?
Matt: So much of the stuff is just obvious. You go somewhere and some of the sites are just—they’re just there.
Hannah: I’m always afraid I’m going to miss something really crucial and local to the place if I don’t have a guide book or in-depth article, especially if I don’t have a lot of time there.
Matt: I find getting a good map is more important, because it will have some of that stuff marked on it anyway. A good city map, good country map, will have interesting things plotted on it. It’ll mark out cemeteries, hotels. And maps are smaller and lighter and more pleasurable to look at.
You know, I did carry one guide book—the Luxe guide to Paris. They’re great. They’re tiny. They’re the high end, luxurious, chic stuff.
Hannah: What were you doing with those?
Matt: Because I don’t care about what backpackers want to do! I want to have the five-star experience even though I only have a two-star budget so I read through them to see what I can afford.
Hannah: Right. In this recent article you said that you wanted to live the high life. So you never had to stay in a train station, in other words?
Matt: No, I didn’t. I guess I could have, but if I had, it would’ve been because I wanted to, not because I had to. Last year when I was doing the Cross Country Road Trip, I had to sleep in my car once. But I didn’t have to. I just wanted to get that out of the way. Not just to say, “oh yeah I’ve slept in my car.” But to have done it, to know how comfortable the back is, to know how to set my stuff up, to know where to find a place to park. If you have to sleep in your car, where do you park?
Hannah: Where did you park?
Matt: Church parking lot, figuring church people would be less likely to kick me out. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Hannah: Did anything happen to you?
Matt: Nope. I slept—not well. The trick was it was kind of warm. You worry about mosquitoes. But you know, I lived.
Hannah: In the article, you say your m.o. is to ignore travel magazines and guide books and adopt the persona of a local. To me that’s exactly what a global nomad does. Not only do they travel all the time for work, but they seek out the vibrant local cultures of each city. What do you think a global nomad is?
Matt: Someone who accepts and expects that they’re going to live, work and play in different countries and different cities all the time and that it’s not surprising when I get an instant message from a friend who says hey, I’m in Istanbul, too, let’s go meet up.
To me that’s the definition of a global nomad. You take it in stride and you expect to be able to say, OK, I’m going off to Tokyo. I’m going to email all of my friends and at least 4 of them will know people in Tokyo for me to go meet up with. And it’s an acceptance that the world works like this now and that we can use it to our advantage.
Hannah: There’s still this idea that globalization means the homogenization of cultures. Do you see that on your travels? Or are you constantly reminded that no, there are still unique traditions?
Matt: Whenever I hear about globalization, I have to check myself, because I automatically think about the 15th century and 16th century and the globalization that started then. In Asia, you had this sudden outpouring of Chinese all over the rest of Asia, especially into Southeast Asia. And then in the later 15th and into the 16th century, you have Europe suddenly expanding everywhere and a lot of this is just driven by trade. That was globalization back then. It was just a lot slower. And it didn’t make the world a more homogeneous place. It produced all of these weird hybrid cultures that now we try and go out and explore. The Chinese in Malaysia, the Chinese in Indonesia— these hybrid cultures there would not have existed without the trade routes of the 15th century. Colonialism didn’t produce copies of France or Portugal in Vietnam and in Brazil. It produced something totally different.
Hannah: Good point.
Matt: Do people complain that because of globalization everybody drinks tea? Until the globalization waves of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century, tea was a localized product and you couldn’t get it outside of the countries where it was grown. And that’s what Coke is. Coke is the tea of the 20th century. And these global products often adapt themselves to the local cultures and local tastes. So you go to Mexico and the Coke is made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, because it’s better tasting to the Mexicans. (It’s probably also a cost thing.) These things that seem very homogeneous are actually not.
Hannah: I remember you telling me about a sake bar in Kyoto that’s run by an Israeli who serves falafel and plays Thelonious Monk. I’ve had a lot of these “global village” moments when I travel: a Thai restaurant in Berlin owned by a Turkish-Mexican couple, a Mexican restaurant in Basel, hearing a cascade of languages as I hiked up Huayna Picchu in Peru. What are some of the most “global village” moments you’ve had?
Matt: I went hiking in central Germany in the Hearts Mountains. Some days I was doing 20 miles, but when I finally came down out of the mountains I had to stop in a small town. There was a big map of the pensiones in this town and I started calling them. I can say “Do you have a room” and if they said no or yes, that was great, but that was the extent of my German. I was really butting up against the language barrier. Finally, I found one place that had a room and when I got where I was supposed to be, I realized that it was not there. I was so frustrated. Where am I going to sleep? I’m tired, I’m hungry, I just want to find a comfortable bed that I can afford.
All of a sudden I see this Asian restaurant with a sign in the window that names the proprietor—and he was Vietnamese. I speak Vietnamese! So I ate and I chatted with the waitress about nothing in particular.
Hannah: You’re a great ambassador for our country, I just wanna say.
Matt: We talked about where I lived in Vietnam, why I speak Vietnamese. It was just so gratifying to be able to communicate that way. It gave me the energy to go back out there and walk a couple more miles through these city streets until I could find a place I could afford.
Hannah: When you have these trips and spend a week or so in these places, have you ever fallen in love with a place and thought, “It’s so nice, I could live there.”
Matt: I could’ve just stopped in Rome and not gone any further.
Hannah: What do you love about it?
Matt: The flow of every day. People just enjoy themselves so much there. For me that was always a good key to knowing a place that would be a good value—that would be a good place for a Frugal Traveler. If people really like to live well and enjoy themselves, they are more likely to give you freebies, try to take care of you. They just want you to have a good time. They want you to eat well. They know you’re going to pay, but having some extravagant price is not what they’re after. They want you to live well because that’s how people live.
Hannah: Yeah, welcome to our country.
Matt: Whereas places that are more frugal, you don’t get as much for your money. Or rather, you get exactly what you pay for.
Hannah: How do you transition so quickly from one culture to the next—do you have any tricks?
Matt: What do you have to change?
Hannah: Language, food, customs. When I travel, I feel that, yeah, globalization has made things common but there are very different personalities or habits—like how in Senegal, toilet paper is a rarity or how in Germany it’s verboten to wear a bathing suit in the sauna—and you don’t really know that until you live there for awhile.
Matt: I try to approach all these places the same way and listen to people and do what they do and just…be open. There’s probably a lot of unconscious mimicry.
Hannah: Weren’t there any moments on your trip where you were like, “Wow, people here are different!?”
Matt: I just noticed the difference between openness in people and closed-offedness. If you get to a country and nobody looks at you, nobody talks to you….
Hannah: Where did you find that?
Matt: A little bit in Poland and Amsterdam. And maybe in England. I spent three nights in Dover which is longer than I think any tourist has ever spent in Dover. Or should.
[Pauses]
Bulgaria. I don’t really want to go back to Bulgaria.
Hannah: Can I quote that?
Matt: I don’t think Bulgaria wants me to come back.
Hannah: Why’s that?
Matt: I wrote an article about snowboarding in Bulgaria that wasn’t terribly positive. (Cackles.) They’re friendly enough, but it’s just not the most entrancing culture for me. The food’s not amazing. The folk music is kind of annoying. It’s just a rough culture.
Hannah: But Lithuania you really liked, right?
Matt: Yeah, Lithuania was so sophisticated. It was surprising just how smooth, functional, and advanced it seemed. How Scandinavian it was. Of course, people coming from the south say that it feels very Scandinavian. When Scandinavians go to Lithuanian they think it’s very Russian. And when Russians go to Lithuania, they think it’s very western and Italian.
Hannah: What’s your preferred mode of communication with friends and family back home?
Matt: E-mail, cell phone, Skype—all of the above. The first thing I do is buy a SIM card. I think it says something about a person as a traveler. Getting a local number makes it so much easier for other people to contact you. To get a SIM card means, “I am spending a little bit of money so that we can be more closely connected.”
Hannah: And it’s not that much.
Matt: In Lithuania it was 4 litas which is, like, $2. But I use Skype a lot as well. I have a “Skype In” number. And so I just forward my U.S. cell phone number to my Skype In number and then tell all calls to Skype Out to the new local cell phone number. It costs me a little, but it’s always cheaper in the end. And it means that people who want to call me from the states can just call my regular number.
Hannah: Wow! That’s a great tip.
I really liked your videocasts for the New York Times—which you did yourself. [See his recap video imbedded here.]
Matt: I had to write a script and everything. Sending the video back was torture, though. Those files are so big. The Internet is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. The worst was in Italy. The slowest Internet.
Hannah: At an Internet café?
Matt: No, it was at the New York Times bureau! (Chuckles.) It’s just Italy—Italy is a third world country.
Hannah: You have to let go of work if you go there.
Matt: It’s the Vietnam of Europe! Deadlines cannot exist. The clock doesn’t exist, the calendar doesn’t exist, deadlines don’t exist.
Hannah: It’s good there’s a place in the world like that. It’s just frustrating if you have to work there.
Matt: Maybe it’s the India of Europe. Except India, I think, has faster broadband. (Laughter.)
Hannah: You send out e-mails before you leave on a trip, asking friends and family if they know anyone in certain cities. But do you also use social networking sites for this purpose?
Matt: I use Facebook all the time. When you’re traveling, it’s essential. I do it as I’m arriving somewhere. Status update: Matt’s in Istanbul, do you know anyone here? Usually someone notices me and is like, “Let’s have coffee at the Grand Bazaar.”
Hannah: So what about other social networking sites?
Matt: MySpace is good. I sign up for all the these sites like to keep up with technology. MySpace doesn’t have the closed-offness that Facebook has—where you have to know somebody and know who they are to read their profile. MySpace doesn’t really have that level of separation, so when I was in Monaco, I don’t know anyone in Monaco, and somehow, none of my friends do either. But I can go on MySpace and search for all users in Monaco.
Hannah: Some people would say you have the perfect job. What do you say to that?
Matt: You know what I say? I say, it’s better than picking grapes. Which is true. Or it’s better than delivering pizza. I’ve done those things, I like doing those. But travel writing is better.
Hannah: There’s nothing bad about it?
Matt: Look, I could complain about it, I could say that it keeps me away from my wife for long stretches of time. I could say that its turned me into a terrible friend. I’m out on the road, making new friends with people in countries that I’m not going to visit again for a very long time, meanwhile, I’m neglecting my friends back home. I could say that it’s stressful, the nights of not knowing where I’m going to sleep, not knowing if I have enough money in the overall budget to cover this meal that I’m having. Wondering if it’s going to take me out of my budget or away from the theme of my story that I’m going to write. It’s incredible stress! I could complain about what I actually get paid by the newspaper. But these are just piddly little complaints. I mean, it is the greatest job that there is!
And when I’m with other travel writers, we’ll complain about these things. But for a regular person—they don’t need to hear that. It is a great job.
