New Travel Book: ‘100 Journeys for the Spirit’
Travel Blog • Eva Holland • 10.25.10 | 12:19 PM ET
The new guidebook rounds up 100 destinations that feed the soul. Twenty-five of those spots get write-ups from well-known travel writers, poets and novelists, including Pico Iyer, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. The Telegraph features several excerpts from the book—here’s Pico Iyer, in the foreword:
We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that’s why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool’s paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. The person who steps out into the silent emptiness of Easter Island is, alas, too often the same person who got onto the plane the day before at Heathrow, red-faced and in a rage.
Yet still the hope persists and sends us out onto the road: certain experiences can so shock or humble us that they take us to places inside ourselves, of terror or wonder or the confounding mixture of them both, that we never see amid the hourly distractions and clutter of home.
They slap us awake and into a recognition of who we might be in our deepest moments.
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Jason Crabtree 10.26.10 | 11:32 AM ET
I’ve not had the opportunity to look at this book, so I’m curious as to the choice of the 100 destinations that feed the soul. My favourite places tend to be those very much off the beaten track and devoid of tourists, often places that one comes across by chance and not from a guide book. I read recently a rather eccentric travel book by Peter Davies, a writer in his 80s, titled “England Lost and Found”, which details a number of travel journeys around the UK (on foot and on a bicycle), pursued with no end in mind other than to discover what he could find that reminded him of “England” (or the idea of England). I mention it as it’s a spiritual journey in a way: everywhere he goes he heads for the nearest church, which - for him - are the places that feed the soul (tho he has his preferences in terms of architecture). Not normally my first choice as a place to feed the soul, but it made me look at the English church in a different light. I wonder how much the choice of places to feed the soul is a personal one.