A Tintin Tour of Jordan

Travel Blog  •  Eva Holland  •  10.21.10 | 12:23 PM ET

The Guardian’s Georgia Brown made an unconventional trip to Petra—guided by a “Tintinologist” and a copy of The Red Sea Sharks. We’ve talked before about Tintin’s appeal to travelers, and in her dispatch Brown’s guide notes another aspect of that appeal:

Thousands of tourists visit Petra every week, but this summer I was part of the first small group of adventurers to arrive at the rose-red city in the footsteps of Tintin, led by one of the world’s leading Tintinologists, Michael Farr.

For Michael—who, dressed in beige linen suit and explorer’s hat, looks to have stepped from that golden era of travel—this is clearly part of the delight. A natural raconteur, he explains that Tintin creator Hergé’s drawings were astonishingly accurate, from his rendering of landscapes such as the Middle Eastern desert and local costumes, down to the accuracy of Egyptian hieroglyphs painted on a tomb or the Chinese lettering on a street banner. When fans of the comics see images of the real thing they perhaps cannot help but be reminded of the books in which they first saw them.

(Via The Book Bench)


Eva Holland is co-editor of World Hum. She is a former associate editor at Up Here and Up Here Business magazines, and a contributor to Vela. She's based in Canada's Yukon territory.


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