Do Travel Writers Lie?

A guy was stabbed to death in a hotel room a few doors down from me once.

There was an argument, I found out later. The people in the room next to him were playing music really loudly, late into the night, so he banged on the door to tell them to turn it down. A scuffle broke out, a knife was pulled, and that’s it, the guy was dead.

I slept through the whole thing. I woke up the next morning and saw police tape everywhere, cop cars lined up in the parking lot. I saw the body being carted away, under a blanket, towards an ambulance.

And then I went to a café and picked up some breakfast.

The town was Jasper, in Alberta, Canada. Jasper is normally just about the safest place in the world, where probably the worst thing that had happened there in the past decade or so was someone not saying sorry after bumping into you. But now a murder? Freakish. Frightening.

I was in Jasper on a travel writing “famil”, which is short for familiarisation tour. That’s essentially a free trip put on by someone – in this case Destination Canada, the country’s tourism board – in the hopes that you the journalist will write nice things about the destination. In fact, it’s more than hope. It’s expectation.