Welcome to the third part of our interview with travel writer Dave Fox. If you love to travel, wish you could travel, love to write or wish you could write, you’re gonna love Dave Fox.

In case you missed either of the first 2 parts of this interview, click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.

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You advise your readers to expect the unexpected when traveling. In Getting Lost you write about getting food poisoning in Istanbul, which made you gravely ill for many months. Was that the worst traveling experience you have ever had?

“Food poisoning” is putting it mildly. It was more like “food nuclear armageddon.” I was very ill and very frightened. What was incredibly powerful about the experience though, was writing about it nearly two decades later in a book of travel humor essays. “When Salads Attack” is one of my favorite chapters in Getting Lost.

It was cathartic to write about such a horrible experience and try to make it funny. It was tough; I had to relive some unpleasant stuff – not just the health problems, but some painful personal issues I was going through at the time as well. And I felt like the chapter had to be in the book, or there would have been a gaping hole in the bigger story. I felt like I was finally at peace with one of my most traumatic experiences ever – not just traveling, but in life in general.

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http://www.aperfectworld.org

The humor in your writing is so refreshing. Have you always been funny?

People often don’t believe this about me, but as a child and into adolescence, I was a shy, awkward, and introverted. Occasionally, I would attempt to come out of my shell and try too hard – kind of like the annoying guy at the party with the lampshade on his head. Travel in foreign places is what helped me accept and share myself, and do so in a more natural way.

The humorous part of me started emerging in high school, though the awkward part was still overshadowing most of the time. I began writing to express things about myself that I couldn’t express otherwise. I got interested in journalism, and also wrote a lot of self-absorbed adolescent poetry. I had a couple of teachers who encouraged me to keep writing. I started experimenting, and started writing funny stuff.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized humor is a genre that comes fairly naturally to me. Actually, my past insecurities have made me comfortable with a self-deprecating writing style, which lends itself well to travel humor. When I started pursuing professional humor writing, 7 or 8 years ago, I took a very geeky approach at first, trying to understand what makes things funny, stretching something funny into something funnier.

So I’d say humor is something I’ve always had in me, but it has taken a lot of time to coax it out – to not only share it with the rest of the world, but to share it with myself as well.

Of all the places you’ve been in the world, what is your absolute favorite?
People ask me that a lot, but I can’t compare Norway to Turkey to Samoa to Vietnam and come up with a favorite. They’re all so different.

Is there any destination you’d like to see, that you haven’t visited yet?

Yes. Greenland, Tuvalu, Argentina, Cape Verde, Albania, Iran, Botswana, Antarctica, the Faroe Islands, Cyprus, Bahrain, Kiribati, Jamaica, China, and Texas, to name a few.

Thanks, Dave!!!

Stay tuned next week for the last part of this interview, Part 4.

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