Meet Erik Trinidad

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Sed ut perspiciatis unde.

We recently connected with Erik Trinidad and have shared our conversation below.

Erik, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

[ REVISED QUESTION: How did you get into your line work? Are you happy with it? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to have a regular job?]

A:
Well, after graduating Rutgers with a degree in graphic design, I hadn’t given much thought to what life might be like outside of just getting a regular office job doing design, just like I’d done in internships and summer jobs, and perhaps settling down with my girlfriend at the time in the New Jersey suburbs. In fact, I was right on track for that “regular life”—but that was all before I got bitten by the travel bug pretty severely, which ultimately led me on a path to pursue travel writing professionally [LINK: https://www.eriktrinidad.com/].

I’d done some travel by this post-college point in my life—road trips around the US, family trips to the Philippines, college backpacking trips around Europe—but nothing too out-of-the-ordinary. Everything changed when I’d been introduced to a client for a side freelance gig, to design and build a website for his gallery in Manhattan that imported and sold African Shona sculptures for decorators and collectors. The gallery owner also had a side hustle: setting up safaris in Botswana. He negotiated a barter with me: a website build for a camping safari through the Okavango Delta and Botswana’s Chobe National Park, from Maun to Victoria Falls.

Of course I said yes, and that camping safari turned out to be a completely transformational experience in every sense of the word. My canon event, if you will. It was on that trip I’d discovered firsthand that National Geographic documentaries made adventures in Africa feel out of reach to the “regular” person, when in reality, they very much are accessible, with park rangers and infrastructure.

At the time, my partner and I were still pretty much on track for “regular life” with regular jobs in our futures—the same as many other mid-twentysomethings, as our peers started to settle down. However, she broke it off with me amicably to pursue her own interests—a blessing in disguise. Rather than wallow in misery, I’d already become obsessed with what other adventures I could do in the world. My next trip was a trek on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. The following year I went to Antarctica on an expedition cruise, back when Antarctic tourism was still in its infancy and trips were a fraction of what they cost today. Then I traveled around Australia with a fellow travel-obsessed friend I’d made on that cruise.

Within three years of that first safari in Botswana, I’d set foot on all seven continents by the age of 28. However, the problem with discovering travel and the world is having the perpetual awareness that there are still other places out there. Too many places out there. And I wanted to experience more; I’d only seen the tip of a massive metaphorical iceberg.

I got laid off from the last full-time job I ever had—perfect timing because I had intended to quit—sold my car, and moved back to my parents to save money. In less than a year, I set off to do my original travel blog chronicling a consecutive sixteen and a half month journey around the world: “The Global Trip” [LINK: https://theglobaltrip.com/] (in which “trip” had the double entendre of both a journey and a wacky guy, i.e., “Erik’s such a trip.”) I backpacked down South America from Quito, Ecuador to Buenos Aires, Argentina, then flew to Cape Town, South Africa to travel over land, via public buses and cars, to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I flew to Egypt for a couple of weeks, then Morocco, then took the ferry across the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain where I zipped around Europe with a Eurail Pass. (The Eurail Pass really gave me freedom to just check out new places and visit family and friends on a whim.) I flew to Moscow from Prague, and traveled across Asian Russia and Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian Railways, stopping in towns on the way with homestays I had arranged. Ultimately I found myself in Beijing to backpack through China for a month, ending in Hong Kong. Then I spent another six months backpacking around Asia—Japan, Nepal, India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia—until I ran out of money.

After traveling 95,000 miles across thirty-seven countries on five continents—having experiences and creating memories that I still reference in my writing today—I headed home for a grand New York re-entry party on my 503rd day.

But that was just the beginning of my travel writing career.

My daily The Global Trip blog has been revered as ahead of its time; it read like a funny novel, and garnered readership by tens of thousands around the world. It inspired countless people to travel, praised by travel publications, including Rick Steves and USA Today, and won some awards. And ultimately it became my CV for travel writing assignments to come. Long story short, my accolades and luck led me to continue traveling professionally, to places I’d still hadn’t seen—like I said, there are too many places in the world. I wrote stories for Discovery and National Geographic, and ultimately for many other travel publications over the years, including Travel + Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, AFAR, Food & Wine, Smithsonian Magazine, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s Travel, and the BBC. The travel dispatches of my original “The Global Trip” blog transitioned into my presence on Instagram [LINK: https://www.instagram.com/theglobaltrip/], Facebook [LINK: https://www.facebook.com/theglobaltrip], and YouTube (@theglobaltrip) [LINK: https://www.youtube.com/@theglobaltrip], where I create videos of my continued travels in a documentary style.

I often think that if my current self went back in time to my younger self—the one who was on track to have a “normal life” with a “normal job”—and tell myself what was going to happen, there’s no way my younger self could believe it. But here I am, and there’s no turning back. In a way, travel is both rewarding but also a curse, because with everywhere that I’ve been already, I still have a never-ending list of places I want to experience in the world.

Erik, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

All that being said about my life as a travel journalist, I still lead a double life, also maintaining a career in design—what I actually went to school for. Because the reality of travel writing—as glamorous as it sounds—is that it’s absolutely not a lucrative career financially. I tell people, if it was easy, everyone would do it. And so, I’m a freelancer in two worlds: travel journalism and design.

Over the years, my graphic design degree evolved into webpage design, which evolved into web animation, then broadcast design, digital filmmaking and video production, and motion graphics design. Since the original Global Trip blog, I’ve spent almost a decade as a freelance designer/animator in New York City’s digital advertising scene [LINK: https://www.trinimation.com/], working on clients including Apple, Samsung, Nintendo, Levi’s, and American Express. I’ve worked on three animated billboards that ran in Times Square. I’ve done on-air graphics for NFL Network and the now defunct Al Jazeera America Network.

Combining both my travel life and my one in video production and motion design, I’ve produced some web series. One is “Plausibly Ridiculous,” [LINK: https://www.plausiblyridiculous.com/] which continues a series of short videos I’d done for Discovery and National Geographic (but retained the rights to), in which I did weird science experiments in different parts of the globe. During the pandemic, I bought a car, but used it to develop “Car Glamping,” [LINK: https://carglamping.com/] a web series about my journey of tricking it out for elevated car camping—i.e. accessible “van life”—which was featured by Newsweek. I’m currently in development with a talented production team to produce episodes for a show project, “Off Tour” [LINK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffm08TG4-Sg] (working title), in which I host a travel show about what local travel guides do in their hometowns—when they’re not being tour guides.

In addition to all this, I love cooking, and started a food humor blog on Tumblr in 2009 (remember Tumblr?) called “Fancy Fast Food.” [LINK: https://www.fancyfastfood.com/] It was a series of mock recipes in which fast food items were completely transformed and styled into haute cuisine-looking meals—without adding outside ingredients—inadvertently spearheading a trend that’s endured on social media since. The blog went viral back then and earned a bunch of awards and accolades, including mentions by Saveur, The Daily Beast, and The New York Times, to name a few. I eventually got bored of doing it and retired the blog—but not until after the end game: a book deal. After book deal offers, eventually my Tumblr was translated into the satirical cookbook I wrote, photographed, and designed, “Fancy Fast Food: Ironic Recipes with No Bun Intended.” In the end, my whole Fancy Fast Food experience led to a collaboration video with NASA, and TV appearances on morning shows, ABC News’ Nightline, Cooking Channel’s “Food(ography),” “Rachael Ray,” and an episode of the Emmy Award-winning “Brain Games” on the National Geographic Channel (now archived on Disney+). It also paved the way me to get into food writing, an additional beat to complement my travel journalism.

So, my collective creative experience is a hodgepodge of many professional and personal projects over the years—chapters of my life, if you will. And like globetrotting, there’s no real end in sight—because trends and mediums change, and the landscape is constantly shifting; it’s not what it was years ago. I constantly have to figure out my “next move,” not only to satisfy my creative desires, but simply, to survive.

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

I have had a fair amount of close calls and near death moments from my travels. During my big sixteen and a half month “The Global Trip,” I’d been mugged at knifepoint in Cape Town. [LINK: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/cute_baby_animals_at_knifepoint] (Despite this, I still recommend Cape Town to everyone because it’s otherwise a beautiful, amazing city in South Africa). I’d been accosted by fake or corrupt Russian cops on the Trans-Siberian Railway [LINK: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly], who threatened me with a gun and tried to get me on a drug charge, while holding my passport for ransom. (I bargained them down from $100 to $30.) I got airlifted off the Everest Trail [LINK: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/die_another_day] and barely survived a bout with altitude sickness, after villagers and volunteers brought me down to a mountain clinic on yakback and horseback [LINK: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/the_long_way_down].

In my later travels, I had some tense situations when an American Jewish backpacker and I hiked across the Judean Desert [LINK: https://www.theglobaltrip.com/blogs/entries/the_wild_wild_west_bank]—despite many warnings not to do so—getting lost but eventually finding our way from Jerusalem in Israel to Jericho in the Palestinian West Bank.

But perhaps the most notable, more recent near death experience was one that I’d blogged in real time in the late summer of 2019, when I was evacuated off an Arctic expedition cruise. A week prior to that expedition, I was on assignment in Fiji, where I possibly contracted a nasty, very mysterious flesh-eating tropical infection—which didn’t impact me until a subsequent trip a week later, in the Arctic Circle of all places. The infection seized my right leg mid-journey of the expedition cruise, as the ship travelled from Greenland, across the Davis Strait, and through the Northwest Passage of the Canadian Arctic. The harrowing military rescue that followed, plus the subsequent three hospitalizations that attempted to find a diagnosis in Iqaluit, Quebec City, and New York, was written as an epic journey [https://www.eriktrinidad.com/tropicalarctic/]—and posted in real time on social media as events unfolded over two months.

I had intended to sell that story after all was said and done, but then another mysterious disease came about in February 2020—that one that spread all over the world—overshadowing any other medical-related news stories for years.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

Many people see my travel articles or my Instagram or YouTube feeds, and think it’s an idyllic life, telling me things like, “It must be nice.” The reality is, as mentioned before, travel writing is not a lucrative career, at least not financially. After a travel experience, you need to pitch a unique, timely angle about it to your roster of editors—some you’ve established working relationships with, others blindly—in hopes you make a sale. Or firstly, in hopes you get a response. The field is so saturated with wannabe and established travel writers pitching stories to a finite amount of travel editors that it’s become fiercely competitive. It’s a career where you must get used to a lot of rejection—and that’s if you’re lucky. Most of the time, editors will simply ghost you, and you’re left hanging, feeling anxious or unfulfilled. And it’s never pleasant, time after time after time again.

If everything aligns and you do actually connect with an editor who likes your story idea and gives you a formal assignment, the typical rate is about $300–400 a piece—which, if you break down how many hours it took to travel, pitch, wait, write, edit, and revise, comes out to below the hourly minimum wage. Almost every travel writer I know has some sort of other job to help pay the bills, unless they are married to a partner who is the actual breadwinner. For me, I’ve gotten by with keeping my feet on two career paths, the travel journalism one, and the design one. I’ve always been lucky to have a somewhat steady stream of freelance design or video editing work to support myself, and keep my schedule flexible for travel.

However, the times are a’changing. Many of my friends in video post production, design, or even coding are out of work. It’s another industry that’s become oversaturated, and certainly AI hasn’t made it easier to land a gig since many tasks that we used to do are automated by some algorithm, or done much more cheaply. On the travel media path, many travel publications are stricken with layoffs or going out of business, and budgets are slashed at the ones that remain. Plus the AI effect is taking its toll on that industry too, with a few outlets turning to AI for travel stories and guides already.

It’s all a hustle, trying to survive, while trying to maintain doing what I love and what I’m capable of. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Why put up with the struggle? Because it feels more like a calling, or a duty, rather than a job. It’s definitely a roller coaster that I think will eventually come to an end, but in the meantime, it’s an thrilling, unpredictable adventure that I’m still riding on, waiting to see what happens next.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
All photo credits are Erik Trinidad, except the desert one in Dubai. My guide, Berke Yunus, took that photo of me.

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Meet Erik Trinidad

Meet Erik Trinidad

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Erik, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

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