Let’s Go or Let’s Not and Say We Did

It stinks in here. Mold, BO and the distinctive scent of used toilet paper in bathroom trash cans down the hall. It’s midnight, and I’m in the bottom bunk of a youth hostel in Istanbul, Turkey. There are six more guys crashed out in the other beds, all of whom have apparently been backpacking in Laundromat-free zones for several months now. Judging by the Let’s Go: Europe guidebooks strewed around the floor, we all wound up in this four-buck-a-night pit the same way. At last I nod off, dreaming of the Turkish-prison scenes in Midnight Express.

I’m jolted awake at 4 a.m. by a shrill air-raid siren. Turns out it’s just the usual morning call to prayer, broadcast from speakers atop mosques all over town. The wailing awakens the chickens, which begin screeching. The chickens awaken the stray dogs, and the dogs awaken one of my bunkmates, who greets us all with an explosive display of flatulence.

In a neighboring part of town, past the elegant garden courts of the Blue Mosque, near the ancient fountains along the Hippodrome park, Nathan Green (not his real name) sleeps in a restored Ottoman mansion tucked away on a hilly side street Nathan, 21, is the student researcher-writer (R-W) for the western-Turkey region of Let’s Go:Greece and Turkey 1995, one of 21 titles in the internationally best-selling Let’s Go series. Though his hotel isn’t actually listed in the self-declared “bible of the budget traveler” (you’ll find it listed in the Insight Guides with other luxury hotels), his mom reserved a night there to cushion Nathan’s arrival today in Turkey. His room is filled with antiques and hand-woven carpets, and there’s a minibar beneath the color TV. Draped across the toilet seat, a paper banner makes a boast rare in these parts: Sanitized for your protection.

Earlier tonight, Nathan and I ate at the Pudding Shop, one of the budget restaurants he needed to review for Let’s Go. Wandering through a maze of ancient alleyways in search of the place, we passed tiny teahouses where men in white robes sipped from glasses on silver trays. Once we got to the main drag, the Pudding Shop was as easy to find as any of the other tourist cafes sharing space with postcard stands. This restaurant uses chemically, Physically and Microbiologically Safe water purified by life flo read a sign by the window, written, like everything else in the place, in English. The menu offered such treats as fish pudding, chicken pudding and Turkish sex pudding, a tasty combination of rice, figs, something that resembled lamb chunks, maybe a few old nuts and bolts…. “But you’re coming here to eat, so enjoy the pudding (which isn’t bad),” Nathan writes of the place in this year’s Let’s Go. How he knew it wasn’t bad is a mystery since he didn’t taste it. A strict vegetarian with a fear of traveler’s diarrhea, he ordered what became his favorite dish during our week in Istanbul: plain white rice. “I think restaurant listings are dumb anyway,” says the travel writer, who is somehow supposed to check about a hundred more restaurants during his 38-day stay in Turkey. “I mean, you go wherever you’re hungry.”

Reported, written and edited entirely by Harvard students, Let’s Go gives more than 100 R-Ws every summer the chance to travel the globe in search of cheap accommodations, meals, attractions and night life. But Travel & Leisure this is not – a lesson R-Ws like Nathan learn the hard way. A boyish, soft-spoken sophomore wearing a Banana Republic-ish safari vest over a “Harvard is hot” T-shirt, he has been thrown into the depths of Istanbul– a serpentine city populated by 10 million people and bombed regularly by Kurdish terrorists – for just five days, during which time he’s expected to cover the entire city by himself. From there, he’ll traverse the rest of western Turkey, following an impossibly dense schedule planned by his editors back home. I’m tagging along just for week No. I (always the toughest and most disorienting), but Nathan will spend the remainder of his summer alone. He’ll tear through Turkey at an average rate of a town per day, barring the one day his editors expect him to research six. He won’t get paid for his work but will receive air fare plus about $40 a day to cover expenses. His mission: To furiously update and add information to last year’s Greece and Turkey book and airmail his “copybatches” to Let’s Go’s Harvard Square office, where they’ll be furiously edited and typeset by other students and transmitted to St. Martin’s Press in time for the publisher to furiously distribute and sell the books to an estimated 3.5 million readers who use them to furiously tear through their destinations each year. According to one staffer, the paperback parody Let’s Blow Thru Europe describes the process of producing the books as much as it does using them. Like many R-Ws through the years, Nathan has barely left the United States before; he describes his travel background as being limited to summer camp and Bermuda, where he toured with Harvard’s Hasty Pudding theatrical company. He was hired not for any experience roughing it on the road (according to in-house literature, most applicants have never traveled Let’s Go style – “single and poor”) but for skills considered more useful to a job that isn’t as much about covering new ground as it is about updating thousands of phone numbers, prices and bus schedules compiled by past R-Ws. Among the most important traits of an R-W: “neatness,” “reliability,” “aplomb” and “a degree of fastidiousness and hyperactivity – some former editors go so far as to use the vulgar term ‘anal-compulsive,'”according to Let’s Go‘s 1995 Editor’s Manual, a student written guide chock-full of tips on hiring and managing your peers.

“My first choices were Israel and Paris,” Nathan says after checking in to my hostel the second day of our trip. He decided to apply for Turkey after taking an Ottomans-history course for his major, Middle Eastern studies. “It sounded like a cool place. I like that They Might Be Giants song about Istanbul. I love the movie Gollipoli. Dude, any subsidized travel is better than no subsidized travel, right?”

When “Let’s Go” began, in 1960, it was a 20-page mimeographed packet for Europe-bound passengers who booked charter flights through Harvard Student Agencies (HSA), a nonprofit corporation founded to employ students. Written for “the adventurous and often impecunious student,” early editions nonetheless included chapters like “Wine Tasting” and “Collecting Art in Paris and London.” Thirty-five years later, Let’s Go is as much a symbol of student travel as a Eurail Pass – ask anyone who has ever ventured to one of the supposedly off-the-beaten-path pubs listed in the books only to find swarms of other students clutching their copies inside. Translated into seven languages, the series now spans more than 40 countries, and Let’s Go: Europe, the series’ flagship, has become the top-selling international-travel guide in the world. Meanwhile, Let’s Go Inc. has become the first for-profit subsidiary of HSA.