Destination: Asia
‘Naked Tourist,’ ‘The Places in Between’ in the New York Times
by Michael Yessis | 06.11.06 | 6:37 PM ET
It’s rare that the New York Times reviews a travel book, and even more rare when it reviews the same travel book twice. And I can’t remember the last travel book that made the cover of the Sunday Book Review. This weekend the paper hit the trifecta. Last Sunday, Lawrence Osborne’s The Naked Tourist: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall landed a spot in a roundup of summer travel books; yesterday it got a full review from William Grimes, who called it a “a biting, highly amusing and occasionally profound inquiry into travel and its discontents.” Today, the cover of the Book Review features Tom Bissell’s stellar review of Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, which chronicles the writer’s walk across Afghanistan in 2002. “Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening,” Bissell writes. “But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban—and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there—Redmond O’Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton—but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.”
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Yahoo! BuzzTraveler’s Literary Companion Series Adds Titles on Mexico and Japan
by Frank Bures | 06.06.06 | 12:32 PM ET
When asked how he prepares to travel to a country, Ryszard Kapuscinski said he reads the literature. Of course, not all of us have time to read an entire canon before every journey. Fortunately, Whereabouts Press has made sampling literature from some countries much easier with its Traveler’s Literary Companion series. Building on the strength of previous editions on Italy, Cuba, Vietnam and other places, the publisher has just added collections on Mexico and Japan. While the guides aren’t comprehensive (Haruki Murakami is notably absent from “Japan,” for example) they do offer a good way to get a feel for a place. They’re also a fine introduction to these countries’ writers, from greats like Carlos Fuentes and Kawabata Yasunari, to lesser known authors like Hino Keizo and Bruno Estanol.
MacLean: ‘Travellers Have Poisoned Tradition and Helped to Pervert the Unique Into the Mundane’
by Michael Yessis | 06.06.06 | 12:31 PM ET
Are we that bad? Rory MacLean, author of the forthcoming book “Magic Bus: On The Hippie Trail From Istanbul To India,” believes so. He takes several shots at modern travelers in an essay in the Guardian, charging not only that they damage cultures like a “fast-mutating virus,” but that they generally seek adventure through physical challenges instead of the spiritual quests embarked upon by earlier generations of travelers. MacLean bookends his piece with some words from one of those travelers, Desmond O’Flattery, a longtime expat in Kathmandu and generally bitter man who laments that his adopted city is full of travelers with Lonely Planet guidebooks. “I mean, at their age we wanted to get into each other and society, not to live in a melt-down world,” he tells MacLean. “We didn’t have guidebooks, we didn’t even know the name of the next country.”
Inside Japan’s “Healing Industry”
by Michael Yessis | 06.06.06 | 12:40 AM ET
Anthony Faiola has an interesting piece in today’s Washington Post about the rise of Japan’s “healing industry,” one of the country’s fastest growing economic segments. “Luxury day spas and high-end massage clinics have grown 11-fold over the past four years into a $1 billion business, according to Yumiko Arimoto, an analyst at Mitsubishi UFJ,” he writes. “The spas offer treatments such as aromatherapy and Hawaiian Lomi Lomi massages, some costing $300 or more per hour.” It’s a little bit California, Faiola writes, and a whole lot Japan.
Changing Times in Bangalore, India
by Jim Benning | 06.05.06 | 1:15 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times’ Vani Rangachar recently traveled to Bangalore, which is (somewhat famously) transforming as a result of a high-tech boon. She discovered a city unlike the one she’d visited as a child, when milk was sold, still warm, by a man milking a water buffalo in front of her grandmother’s house. “Those water buffaloes had long since vanished from Bangalore’s streets,” she writes in a compelling story. “High-rise apartment buildings tower where there were farm fields. In a city that once had no grocery stores, there is now a Food World, with milk and vegetables in refrigerated cases, freezers full of prepared foods and shelves stocked with Skippy. And my cousins do more than visit temples when they vacation. They relax at beach resorts, go white-water rafting or rent houseboats on a mountain lake.”
Mt. Everest: A Climber’s Controversial Decision
by Jim Benning | 06.01.06 | 12:49 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times today recounts an expedition last month in which climbers left a man to die near the summit. Everest icon Sir Edmund Hillary condemned the incident, saying, “Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain.”
No. 2: “The Road to Oxiana” by Robert Byron
by Tom Bissell | 05.30.06 | 7:51 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1937
Territory covered: Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan
No. 3: “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux
by Terry Ward | 05.29.06 | 12:58 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1975
Territory covered: India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Japan
George Saunders on Nepal’s “Buddha Boy”
by Michael Yessis | 05.29.06 | 11:38 AM ET
When the editors at GQ asked In Persuasion Nation writer George Saunders to travel to Nepal to write about Ram Bahadur Bomjon—before he abandoned his spot a couple months ago, the 15-year-old “Buddha Boy” was making headlines around the world for meditating under a tree and not eating, drinking or moving for months—Saunders said no. But he couldn’t get the kid off his mind. The account of the trip Saunders eventually took appears in the June issue of GQ. Though Saunders’ story is more about the writer, really, than the Buddha Boy, it does provide an interesting look at what may or may not be an elaborate hoax as well as a Nepal in turmoil.
No. 7: “Golden Earth” by Norman Lewis
by Frank Bures | 05.25.06 | 7:53 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1952
Territory covered: Burma/Myanmar
In 1951, not long after Southeast Asia had been a bloody battleground in World War II, a quiet, unobtrusive man set off from Wales for Burma, where he would spend three months traveling for one of the classics of travel writing, Golden Earth. It was not the only classic he would write: For more than 60 years, Lewis traveled the world and wrote some 30 travelogues and novels. During his travels Lewis had his skull fractured, watched men brain each other with femurs and, at 80, tried to get into Irian Jaya to interview some tribe members who had apparently barbecued and eaten 13 missionaries. According to another (possibly apocryphal) story, Lewis was sent by Ian Fleming to check in on Ed Scott, the model for James Bond. While the two were talking, unbeknown to them Graham Greene was watching, and used the scene for “Our Man in Havana.” But Lewis was our man in many, many places: India, Guatemala, Vietnam, Sicily, Spain, the Middle East and, of course, Burma, which he wrote, “spread as a dark stain into the midnight sea.” Lewis spent three months there and the going was rough: His train from Rangoon to Mandalay was delayed when explosions damaged the rail in front and behind him. But compared to the road he traveled, Lewis’s prose is smooth. It is also full of the humor and the humanity of the people he met along the way. As Pico Iyer says, “Out of marvels he makes melodies.” “Golden Earth” shows both Burma and Lewis at their most marvelous.
No. 8: “Video Night in Kathmandu” by Pico Iyer
by Rolf Potts | 05.24.06 | 11:04 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1988
Territory covered: East and South Asia
A collection of 11 essays chronicling the cultural fusion of East and West in the 1980s, Iyer’s literary debut is an answer to all those critics who claim that great travel writing died once the terra incognita was mapped. As this Asia-themed collection shows, the final frontier of adventure isn’t located on some distant mountain or impenetrable jungle, but in the intimate (and often comical) cross-cultural fascinations and discoveries that arise from an ever-shrinking world.
Amid his sharp reportage and analysis, Video Night in Kathmandu‘s greatest strength is Iyer’s refusal to draw prim moral conclusions as Western popular culture bumps up against the traditions of the East. Instead, he casts things in terms of a tenuous romance.
“When Westerner meets Easterner,” Iyer writes, “each finds himself often drawn to the other, yet mystified; each projects his romantic hopes on the stranger, as well as his designs; and each pursues both his illusions and his vested interests with a curious mix of innocence and calculation that shifts with every step.” Moreover, the author’s eye for ironic juxtapositions—Rambo-inspired musicals in India, baseball fever in Japan, Mowhawk haircuts in Bali—proves so keen that he practically inaugurates the now-common “cultural-contradiction” travel-story template. Even if the specific cross-cultural obsessions of “Video Night” (Michael Jackson, Rambo) seem a bit dated, the ensuing rise of globalization and reach of the Internet have only underscored how relevant Iyer’s observations were.
No. 11: “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiessen
by Rolf Potts | 05.21.06 | 10:00 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1978
Territory covered: the Himalayan Dolpo region of Nepal
Matthiessen’s Zen-flavored masterpiece is as much a classic of nature and spiritual literature as it is of travel writing. Documenting a 1973 journey into the remote Dolpo region of Nepal, Matthiessen officially sets out to help zoologist George Schaller study Himalayan blue sheep. As he takes the reader deep into the mountains, however, we realize that Matthiessen is using this scientific journey as a metaphor to reflect on much broader matters of life, death and existence itself. The famous irony of The Snow Leopard is that Matthiessen never spots the elusive creature during his adventure.
Thus, robbed of the climactic moment, the author leads us into the simple essence of his journey: “the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clayfires of smudgy juniper, the coarse, dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do.” In this way, the spiritual lessons of this book aren’t relegated to romantic abstractions or heady epiphanies, but to a gentle reminder that life consists of what each moment brings us; that it’s futile to obsess on the workings of the past and future if you’re missing out on experience of the present moment.
The Historical Rise in Chinese Tourists
by Jim Benning | 05.19.06 | 1:41 PM ET
The New York Times reported on the phenomenon earlier this week: “For the first time in history, large numbers of Chinese are leaving their country as tourists, resulting in an unparalleled explosion in Chinese travel. If current projections are met, the global tourism industry will be undergoing a crash course in everything Chinese to accommodate the needs of what promises to be the greatest wave of international travelers ever.” The story notes Lonely Planet’s foray into Chinese-language guidebooks beginning next month: “The initial titles cover Germany, Britain, Europe and Australia, with guides covering the United States, Canada and Southeast Asia due soon afterward.” It’ll be interesting to see how all this develops. I was in China a few years ago. My most enduring recollection of Chinese bus tourists traveling within their own country was the great risk I saw several of them take leaping onto a tiny rock in the midst of a rushing river in order to pose, sullen-faced, for photographs. I couldn’t imagine most Americans willing to take that leap. And they seemed to thinking nothing of it. Granted, these might have been particularly daring Chinese travelers, and one always has to be careful making generalizations, but let’s just say that if the tourist Olympics are held any time soon, my money is on the Chinese.
No. 16: “City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple
by Terry Ward | 05.16.06 | 10:26 AM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1993
Territory covered: India
An intrepid Scotsman who undertook the adventures chronicled in his first book, “In Xanadu,” at the tender age of 22, William Dalrymple spent a year in Delhi to research City of Djinns. He and his wife, Olivia, set themselves up in a small flat near the Sufi village of Nizamuddin. The common characters who enter their lives—from an opinionated Sikh taxi driver to their frugal and frenetic landlord—are as carefully revealed as the eunuchs and dervishes Dalrymple meets. All prove inextricable from the city’s diverse fabric. The djinns—“like us in all things, but fashioned from fire,” spirits invisible to the naked eye and only seen during times of fasting and prayer—seem as elusive as the richly layered city itself in the end. Dalrymple’s informative historical narrative, carrying the reader from Delhi’s Muslim and Hindu roots to partition, never becomes dull or droning. It’s one man’s impression of one of the planet’s most fascinating cities. For those who love travel for travel’s sake and travel writing for the vicarious ride it can deliver, “City of Djinns” is a classic.
No. 17: “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” by Eric Newby
by Michael Shapiro | 05.15.06 | 4:00 PM ET
To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1958
Territory covered: Afghanistan
In A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, one of the classic mid-century travel adventures, Newby sets out to climb one of Afghanistan’s highest peaks with just four days of mountaineering experience under his belt. His inexperience shows. Near the 20,000-foot summit, he has an ice axe in one hand and a climbing manual in the other, trying to learn how to carve steps in the ice. Known for his wry and self-deprecating humor, Newby is a delightful traveling companion and his descriptions of the high-altitude Kush convey a shimmering sense of wonder. His failure to reach the summit becomes almost irrelevant, because the tale is about the journey, not the final destination. At his side for part of the trip (but not the climb itself, which he did with a friend) is his stolid wife Wanda, who helped save Newby’s life during World War II when he escaped from a POW camp. That story is related in Newby’s “Love and War in the Apennines.” Like his contemporary, Wilfred Thesiger, Newby was an intrepid explorer who helped define the modern travel narrative with sly commentary on our common humanity.