Jonathan Bousfield is going through a nomadic phase. He's been co-writing the Rough Guides to Austria, Poland, Croatia and Bulgaria for the last 10 years and is about to write the first Rough Guide to the Baltic States. He's currently in Sofia for seven weeks to research the fourth edition of the Rough Guide to Bulgaria.

For many people, travel guide writing is a dream job and Bousfield doesn't disagree. He points out that it's not as well paid as the jobs his peers got when they left college but said it's been a fantastic experience and he's met a lot of interesting people. Writing the Rough Guide has also given him the opportunity to develop his interests and to indulge in his own obsessions. "The Rough Guide format is really great for that," he said.

After graduating from Oxford University he drifted aimlessly for a while before becoming a music journalist for the now defunct European newspaper. He then became involved with the Rough Guide through friends and helped to write the Yugoslavian Rough Guide shortly before war broke out in 1991. "That was quite a short lived project," he said. "But they must have liked what I wrote because they asked me to work on the first guide to Bulgaria."

Since then, he has seen a lot of changes here - some for the better and a lot for the worse. "The cafes and restaurants have improved and there's a wider choice of accommodations," he said. "I write for tourists so these are the things I look for and the changes are a big plus." On the downside he's noticed that the urban infrastructure has decayed immeasurably in recent years. The airport, rail and bus stations have become more chaotic and he now rates Sofia as one of the most difficult European cities to arrive in.

"For the independent travellers that form a large part of my readership, that's a problem - they have to spend their first few hours finding out where the hell they are and how to get out. It's a shame because Sofia is a laid back, sexy city that needs time to be appreciated. If new arrivals find it hard to deal with, they may not stay long enough to realize this."

For him, it's obvious that Sofia needs a tourist information office that could offer both practical and cultural information but he understands that this would cost the municipality money which could be used elsewhere. "It's difficult for them to see the connection between developing the tourist infrastructure and the resulting profits because it's not quantifiable," he said. "But it's incontestable that if it was improved, people would stay longer and spend more money."

Updating the Bulgaria guide is a lot less strenuous than putting together the first edition. "That was completely bizarre because I was travelling from place to place all the time. It was a really difficult but great job." The fourth edition is not as straightforward as updating guides to other countries because Bulgaria changes unpredictably. "The guide is on a three-year schedule but Bulgaria is not," he said. "Practical information can change a lot quicker than that, so, in a way, the book is always catching up with the real situation."

One of the difficulties of the job is knowing which establishments will be in business for the duration of the guide. "You need an instinct to know this and I haven't developed it yet, but I'm working on it," he said. When he updated the first edition in 1996, he was so impressed by the amount of new restaurants and cafes that he included most of them. A year later he returned to find that many had shut down. He was more careful with the third edition, choosing places which looked solid enough to survive. "But even now I'm wandering around Sofia thinking 'Oh no, have I sent someone to that place that's closed down?'"

He read a wide range of literature for the original edition including texts only available in Bulgarian. These are sometimes quoted in the book. "I do it to show off my erudition and it also reassures the readers that I've gone beyond the English language," he said. The old Bulgarian Ministry of Trade and Tourism was helpful in the past but there is still a lot of legwork for him to do. This week he spent part of a day travelling to a town outside Sofia just to check if it still had a bus service to Rila monastery. "There was no other reason for me to go there, and it took up most of the day, but to see that there was a bus and to find the timetable gave me a lot of professional satisfaction."

The guides are aimed at independent travellers, many of whom are young backpackers travelling on a low budget. Bousfield admitted that he never backpacked anywhere in his youth but he now lives out of his rucksack for months at a time.

Budget travellers often make a distinction between themselves and tourists. They believe that by travelling without the comforts of luxury hotels and first class trains they will truly experience their foreign surroundings. "This is nonsense," said Bousfield. "Backpackers are simply consumers of leisure time. The idea of the traveller, as opposed to the tourist, was invented by middle class people who wanted to feel better about how they were spending their leisure time. It's the character of the person that counts."

For him, the perfect traveller is the person who stays at home and travels only in their mind. "They're not burning airline fuel or contributing to any distortions of local economies caused by tourism."

The fourth Rough Guide to Bulgaria will be published next spring and will be co-written by Dan Richardson. "I'm sorry that I couldn't have stayed longer here, but I've had too much to do," he said. "It takes months to get that feeling of being an insider. Three years ago, I spent four months here and went absolutely everywhere."

Bousfield will be spending the winter in Riga, Latvia working on his guide to the Baltic States and hopes that it will be available by the end of next year.