![]() ![]() ![]() As one of Lonely Planet’s few in-house editors of colour, I thought myself more useful on the other side of the fence. It always seemed like this inaccessible dream that was reserved exclusively for white, Baby Boomer and Gen-Xer men, perhaps descended from some financial privilege – not a melanated millennial woman with a mountain of student loan debt, raised by a single black father who worked as a US public school teacher. And it certainly wasn’t a profession that I envisioned as a possibility for someone like me. Being a writer – much less a travel writer – was never an aspiration. A couple of weeks after I returned to the office from that trip, I handed in my resignation.Įncountering this century-old Galápagos Islands tortoise was one of many experiences that sold a life on the road © MaSovaida Morgan / Lonely Planet Swapping the office for the open roadįor my entire career, I dwelled behind the scenes as an editor. After a long stint focused on the background work, LP gave me the opportunity to do a research assignment to provide some insight into what our writers experience. So when the time came for me to commission a destination update of Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands, I pitched for the fabled archipelago myself – and it only took a handful of days on the ground for me to realize that this was the type of work I needed to do. But the reality is that we entrusted our writers on the ground as the destination experts and only visited the areas we were responsible for on rare occasions, typically on fam trips that were not funded by Lonely Planet. One of the misconceptions about this job was that as editors, we traveled to our regions often. I got to work in a quirky office with amazing people who ate, slept and breathed travel – and there wasn't a pantsuit in sight. It was, by all accounts, a dream job that most wanderlusty media types would kill to have. For four years, I oversaw all of the company’s editorial content for South America, and a large part of that role was selecting the best freelance writers to research our print and digital content on the ground. In 2014, I landed my role as a Lonely Planet Destination Editor thanks to a post I saw on LinkedIn. Even the statues wanted a selfie in South Korea © MaSovaida Morgan / Lonely Planet Working nine to five ![]()
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