Mountain Road

Destination: The Whole World

Books for the Travel Library:

The Lunatic Express: Discovering the World…Via Its Most Dangerous Buses, Boats, Trains, and Planes by Carl Hoffman (NEW March 2010)

The Routes of Man:How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today by Ted Conover (NEW February, 2010)

I can’t seem to move these days without tripping over a book that has to do with roads and road trips.  And here come two brand new books that tackle some of the roughest and most interesting roads (in the broadest sense) in the world.

Carl Hoffman‘s travel plan involves the most dangerous land, sea and air routes he can find. An Africa train lends its name to the title of the book, Lunatic Express, but the rest of the conveyances are pretty crazy, too.  I once had a travel writing teacher who said that travel writers should expose themselves to danger and then write about it in order to get the most compelling stories.  Hoffman must have heard that lecture through an amplifier.

Throughout this travel book he seems absolutely driven to destroy himself, proudly quoting newspaper articles about disastrous crashes of trains and sinking of ships, deadly robberies of buses, and airplanes that fall out of the sky.  He does have a way with description, although his road trips major in places that are dirty, humid, hot, smelly and uncomfortable–not exactly tourist attractions.  I really enjoyed reading his conversations with the fascinating people that he meets, in particular a Swiss businessman in Mombasa whose greatest accomplishment was that he never paid taxes.

“I spent three years in Uganda before coming to Kenya, and those were the best three years of my life,” he said. “In Kampala I met a woman.  It is the only time I have been in love.  She was thirty-five, from the Rwenzori mountains.  She couldn’t read or write, but she was a born trader.  She knew it deep in her blood.  And she was beautiful.  She said, ‘Give me two thousand dollars.’ I did. She traded in charcoal, and every night she arrived with a pile of Ugandan money on my table.”

In a rather-too-frequent moment of self assessment, he says “…I, too, craved adventure, even if risk and loneliness was its by-product.” I say rather too frequent, because I was somehow not convinced of these intrusions of rationality into his self-centered rush to risk. He even takes his daughter with him on a rough bus ride in South America, hoping, he says that she will understand what he does. Perhaps, I was thinking, he should stay home once in a while and find out what she does? And although he talks frequently about how he has ruined his marriage, he thanks his wife at the end of the book, for 27 years of unfailing support.
A chapter at a time, the book amuses and entertains,but as a whole book, it felt contrived. He found out how “the other half travels” but rarely actually felt danger. Excellent writing, but a flimsy frame with personal ponderings that to me seemed gratuitous.

Routes of Man (meant by author Ted Conover to be pronounced “roots” so you get the double meaning), on the other hand, sets forth a strong premise that kept me fascinated throughout. Six long chapterd of reportage are each followed by a brief discussion on the  idea of travel and related thoughts–paths, roads, speed, progress.

Conover is considering  big issues here — issues like the destruction of traditional cultures and the relationship of the military and roads (dating back to the Romans and up to the Israelis). His style includes vivid enough pictures of places* and portraits of people, but the ideas take center stage, and in a calmer voice (even when he lands in some scary places) than Hoffman’s. (Conover is no stranger to the put-yourself-in-danger school of writing, having worked as a guard at Sing-Sing among other things, to get his story.)

*Conover traveling on an iced-over river in the Himalayan:

Depending on the light and the sky, the water will be pitch-black or pellucid blue, the surface rippled by crystals of ice, a giant moving Slurpee, swirling around frozen banks and then disappearing under sheets of ice.

The subtitles reflect the fact that most such appendages are written by a marketer rather than the author, and don’t necessarily reflect the book as a whole. Lunatic Express doesn’t set out to “discover the world” but rather to “experience” the world travel as it is seen by the masses, as opposed to the privileged tourist. And as to the subtitle for Routes of Man? I give up. That’s a little of the book’s meaning–but not much.

These both make a good addition to a traveler’s library, but if you only get one, you can choose which fits you best.

Photo from Flickr through Creative Commons. Click on picture for more information about photographer.  Publishers of each book gave me a review copy–which will turn up in a Giveaway one of these days.

Do you think travel writing is more interesting when the writer has but him/herself in danger? And which of these books appeals to you more?

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A radio show with some big name travel writers discussing travel writing.

100 Travel Novels

In case you don’t have enough books to read, check out this list of 100 travel novels that let you travel the world courtesy of the On-Line Degrees site.

Favorites Page

I’ve added a couple of sites to my favorites page lately. That’s a very good place to go when you are looking for some good reading, because I am very, very picky. All picks are listed alphabetically, and then by category, so you should be able to pick what you want pretty easily.

Let me tell you about one site: Feast. This is a quarterly newsletter that brings you news about books, art and travel  all rolled into one. Great read, and highly recommended.

And then there is Literary Journeys with the Traveling Rat. A librarian posts book reviews, many having the same sort of criteria we use here. The posts are not frequent, but browsing past posts will get you some great reads.

Short post today. Happy Mother’s Day Weekend.

Don’t forget the Great Big Travel Literature Giveaway II. Comments today count toward a drawing at midnight tonight (Friday). Comments on Saturday and Sunday count toward the drawing Monday night.

Good luck everybody. And happy weekend.

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©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

I hasten to assure you that I would love this magazine even if they were NOT publishing my book reviews. But they are, and I’m very happy to be part of such a great product.  You can read my reviews of Paris Movie Walks, the Moon Fiji guidebook, and a beautiful coffee table book about explorations that have shaped our view of the world.  I reviewed Paris Movie Walks here earlier and Explorations that Changed History appears on my suggested gift list (Number Two).

But enough about me–just imagine a new magazine, in this time of failing print publications, that features gorgeous photography and top notch travel writing.  You’ve probably seen one or more of the regular columnists doing their travel writing thing in other venues–Kim Mance writes about Women’s Travel, Christine Gilbert Almost Fearless, writes about her switch from corporate life to high-tech travel writing, and Darren Cronian, who entertains and enlightens and infuriates us with Travel Rants does his thing.  Craig and Linda Martin add beautiful features and practical goodies.

This issue features New Zealand summer as Craig leads us on a comprehensive tour of the two islands; European skiing, photos of China and so much more will keep me busy with the magazine for days.

You can get a print edition or get a free download to RSS or to I-tunes. Check it out and get inspired to travel.

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©2010 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

There I was wondering what on earth I could write about for my 200th POST, when my Blackberry blinked and buzzed and delivered up this article from Last Friday’s Guardian newspaper.  William Dalrymple’s thoughts on travel literature deserve a reading because he is one of the greats of travel writing himself. But what he has written in the Guardian also deserves a lot of discussion.

I hope to start some of that discussion right here.  (Wouldn’t it be fun to have a roundtable discussion with some of the Travel Insights 100 about this one?)

Here are some of the statements in his piece.

It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.

Oh, please. Of course the travel writers of a former age are dying, but new writers constantly appear to take their place. And as for mediocre travel writing, from Victorian times through the 1940′s just about everyone who graduated college in England traveled and wrote about it. Early bloggers?

He does acknowledge some fine newer writers, but does not believe they are in the same league as Eric Newby, William Thesiger, and Norman Lewis, who passed away in the last few years. I also lament the loss of these writers, and know that my own personal favorite, Patrick Leigh Fermor is in his nineties and feeble, but that does not mean travel writing is dead.

First he sympathizes with the academic view that travel writers from the West have patronized the East.

But the attitudes of today’s travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily “as an act of domination”.

Then he says it isn’t so.

Also, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other.

Is this true? or a sweeping generalization?

…is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe?

Ahh, all writers of any genre better hang it up, then because Wikipedia can do it for us.

Dalrymple has lived in India for some time (gone native, as they would have said during the Raj) and so, surprise, surprise, he finds a batch of writers with ties to India to be among the best travel writers today. AND, more surprise, he thinks that settling in to live in one foreign culture for an extended period will yield the best writing.

He ends on a much more upbeat note with a quote from William Thubron

A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people’s existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute.

This article contains fascinating details from Dalrymple’s life in India and recollections of some of the late travel writers.  I look forward to reading his new book, to be published next month, and would not even mind if the Bloomsbury sent me an ARC (hint!), but I have very mixed feelings about the contradictory and self-serving arguments used in this article. (And according to the comment section one of the new writers he praised is his niece. Is that playing fair?)

Please join the conversation about the future of travel writing. (And if you read Dalrymple’s article, don’t miss the comments on a different page.)

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Given the opportunity to read about the haunts of writers like T. E. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams, Ayn Rand, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemmingway, the Beats of San Francisco and more famous authors, I turned immediately to…

Winnie-the-Pooh

What can I say? The thought of visiting the little piece of England that was the home of Christopher Robin, and A.A. Milne‘s inspiration for  Winnie-the-Pooh books was irresistible to a lifelong Pooh fan. Who knew that Ashdown Forest is preserved as a national protected area? And that Poohsticks bridge still exists? I loved the way that Yvonne Jeffrey Hope who wrote the essay, played with the style of the books in her piece.

When it begins to rain, she says:

In a distinctly Winnie-the-Poohish way, I began to wonder if striding over Ashdown Forest on a blustery October day was really such a good idea.  I wasn’t concerned about coming across Hostile Animals, such as Woozles or possibly Jagulars, but I did have an idea that I was in danger of becoming rather late for lunch.

Pooh fans will know that lunch, like all meals and even snack times, is Not To Be Missed, and I was, after all, in Pooh territory.

It all made me want to scurrying over to the Children’s Books section of my own library and re-read my favorite House at Pooh Corner and Now We Are Six for the teen-hundredth time.

You can take tiny bites of Literary Trips, a collection of essays about famous literary figures and the places they inhabited. No need to try to gulp it all down at once.  I admit that I have not read all the way through Literary Trips yet, but I did not stop reading because I became bored. Far from it. After Pooh, I leafed back to read about the San Francisco beats, the authors of New Orleans, Paul Bowles’ Tangier… I’m saving some for a tasty snack later on.

Literary Trips, Following in the Footsteps of Fame (2000), edited by Victoria Brooks starts out with a bang–an introduction by Paul Bowles– and continues throughout to exceed expectations. Volume Two (2001) continues in the same vein.

An outstanding group of travel writers, mostly Canadian, wrote the entries here. Literary Trips II (2001) was introduced by Arthur C. Clarke in 2002–the year of his famous science fiction classic.

The essays that make up the book give you more biography of the authors than the guidebook approach one generally gets in pieces on visiting literary places.  The first book covers 30 authors and 23 different locales.  The destinations are as diverse as Tonga and Minnesota.  Helpful data on the destination, hotels, etc., is presented in condensed form at the end of each essay. These two books are now permanent fictures in my Traveler’s Library–inspiring me to read more words of the authors featured and visit the lands that inspired them to write.

These two books were self published by a company is called Victoria Books, Great Escapes.com Publishing. Great Escapes is a web site that seems to be moribund, with no new entries since about 2002.  If anyone out there can give me more information, I would certainly appreciate it.

If your own homeland harbored a famous author, be sure to enter his/her name and works in the survey you can click to from the top of this page. Put your place on the map!

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