New Travel Book: ‘Traversa’

Travel Blog  •  Frank Bures  •  02.11.08 | 10:33 AM ET

imageFull title: “Traversa: A Solo Walk Across Africa, from the Skeleton Coast to the Indian Ocean”

Author: Fran Sandham, a former Rough Guides editor

Released: Feb. 14, 2008 (U.S.)

Travel genre: Walking travel

Territory covered: Namibia, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania

Promo copy: “Inspired by the legendary explorers who first crossed the African heartland, Fran Sandham left the daily grind of London to undertake an extraordinary adventure. He traveled on foot across Africa from the Skeleton Coast…until he reached the Indian Ocean. Traversa is the fascinating account of the hardships and hilarity that he experienced during his epic solo journey. Sandham describes his brushes with lions and snakes, land mines and bandits, his two-month battle with a syphilitic donkey, malaria, cockroaches the size of mice, and the other everyday troubles that arise when walking across Africa. Underpinned with the stories of his forerunners—David Livingstone, Sir H. M. Stanley, and Sir Francis Galton, among others—Traversa is the enthralling account of a real-life modern-day adventure against the elements.”

Critical verdict, Zagat-style: “[I]t’s a big ask for readers to be so fascinated in one man’s walking holiday that they’ll stay with it for 270 pages of blisters and heatstroke. And yet he is a likeable and self-deprecating narrator, and I found myself increasingly gripped…By the end I was getting a real vicarious thrill—not from the hammed-up threats from scorpions or restless natives, but from the author sharing his terror that actually the whole year-long, sweat-drenched, escapade had been a complete waste of time.” (The Guardian). “Like Livingstone and Stanley, with whose travels he leavens his own, Sandham has to contend with threats from disease and marauding lions, although cute American tourists are a purely modern hazard. His decision to write in the present tense is the book’s one weakness, not so much lending it immediacy as making it read too often like the casually written diary as which it began life. Yet his pluck is appealing, as is the maturity of anyone who can dedicate two years to such a task and then question whether he has merely treated Africa as a playground.” (The Daily Telegraph)

Photos: From Sandham’s Web site. 

Find it: Amazon, Powell’s, Author

Related on World Hum:
* ‘The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa’
* Will Self: On ‘Psychogeography’ and the Places That Choose You

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1 Comment for New Travel Book: ‘Traversa’

Edgardo 02.13.08 | 1:39 AM ET

It might be very helpful for my next trip.

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