Travel Blog
No. 25: “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor
by Tom Swick | 05.07.06 | 1:04 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: 1977
Territory covered: Europe
This is a glorious feast, the account of a walk in 1934 from the Hook of Holland to what was then Constantinople. The 18-year-old Fermor began by sleeping in barns but, after meeting some landowners early on, got occasional introductions to castles. So he experienced life from both sides, and with all the senses, absorbing everything: flora and fauna, art and architecture, geography, clothing, music, foods, religions, languages. Writing the book decades after the fact, in a baroque style that is always rigorous, never flowery, he was able to inject historical depth while still retaining the feeling of boyish enthusiasm and boundless curiosity.
This is the first of a still uncompleted trilogy; the second volume, “Between the Woods and the Water,” takes him through Hungary and Romania; together they capture better than any books I know the remedial, intoxicating joy of travel.
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Yahoo! BuzzThe Critics: “Oracle Bones” by Peter Hessler
by Jim Benning | 05.06.06 | 2:35 PM ET
Peter Hessler’s new book, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, earned a glowing review in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Writes Seth Faison: “[H]e goes beyond the usual ways of evaluating so complex a culture. Instead, his focus wanders intelligently and settles into corners of China that we don’t ordinarily read about. With quiet power, his writing glues stories into a coherent whole.” That said, Faison wishes there were more of Hessler in the book: “Hessler reveals little about himself. He seems to thrive on what he calls the ‘floating life’ of a writer, observing contemporary China with detachment. The power of his storytelling would be even stronger if his own personality emerged in it.” Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze is a modern classic.
No. 26: “Baghdad Without a Map” by Tony Horwitz
by Rolf Potts | 05.06.06 | 1:30 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: 1991
Territory covered: The Middle East
The Middle East is a region that is constantly in the news, though amidst all the headlines and analysis coming from the area, it is rare that we ever learn about the lives of the people who dwell there. Published shortly after the beginning (and rapid end) of the first Gulf War, Baghdad Without a Map collects Horwitz’s dispatches from places like Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran and Sudan to paint a multi-faceted human face on a region that is too often obscured by crisis-driven news stories. Indeed, the reader can’t help but consider the contradictions of the Middle East when Horwitz chats with an Iranian protester who—in-between chants of “Death to America!”—claims that his dream has always been to visit Disneyland and “take my children on the tea-cup ride.” Serious, funny and empathetic at the same time, Horwitz uses simple tales (shopping for a popular stimulant in Yemen, for instance, or attending a belly-dancing gig in Egypt) to introduce us to hospitable people whose lives are being shaped by old social forces (religion, politics, poverty) as well as new ones (modernity, media, globalization).
Study Travel Writing off the Turkish Coast
by Jim Benning | 05.06.06 | 12:35 PM ET
Travelers’ Tales Executive Editor Larry Habegger will be leading a narrative writing workshop on a yacht off Turkey this June—what a gig, what a classroom. Travelers’ Tales has details.
Interview with the San Francisco Chronicle’s John Flinn
by Jim Benning | 05.05.06 | 2:57 PM ET
Mount Merapi, Indonesia
by Ben Keene | 05.05.06 | 1:36 PM ET
Coordinates: 7 32 S 110 36 E
Elevation: 9,550 feet (2,911 m)
To call volcano tourism a hot trend would not only be a bad pun, but also somewhat of an exaggeration; yes it exists, but it isn’t for everybody. For those climbers and thrill seekers with summer plans to visit the slopes of Mount Merapi, the youngest and most active volcanic peak in Indonesia: Start looking elsewhere. Ash and gas have been issuing from the cone for several weeks and authorities monitoring Merapi’s activity have encouraged the local population to evacuate the area, warning that a major eruption is increasingly likely. Located on the island of Java where the Australian tectonic plate meets the larger Eurasian plate, this menacing mountain last erupted in 1994.
—.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) is the editor of the Oxford Atlas of the World.
No. 27: “The Size of the World” by Jeff Greenwald
by Michael Shapiro | 05.05.06 | 1:22 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: 1997
Territory covered: Latin America, Asia, Africa
In 1994, to commemorate his 40th birthday, Jeff Greenwald decides to travel around the world without getting on an airplane. As the date approaches, he wonders if he should cancel the trip and focus on his magazine writing. But then he realizes that freelancing has become a “dead end” where “once-celebrated word wranglers on dark corners moon about their Precambrian cover stories for Esquire while they suck Night Train from brown paper bags.” So he places a personal ad seeking a female companion for the trip. He meets eight candidates, one at a time, at a Chinese restaurant, “a bow to the old Jewish proverb that you can learn everything you need to know about someone by ordering Chinese food with them.” One candidate looks promising till she blows her nose into the last mu-shu pancake. Then an old flame of Greenwald’s agrees to go. The couple moves by bus, boat and train, and after his companion has to leave, Greenwald completes the nine-month journey on his own. He has riveting encounters with the famous, such as Paul Bowles in Tangier, and with ordinary people, including Tibetans struggling for basic rights. Greenwald’s New York upbringing is evident in his savvy maneuvering at border crossings and in his sharp-edged humor. Included in the book are dispatches he filed for Global Network Navigator, an early online magazine that published Greenwald’s essays just hours after he wrote them. In a 1996 interview, Greenwald told me: “I had this sense of being almost on fire, that the excitement and heat of my journey was something I could broadcast in no time at all. It was a very giddy feeling.” Fortunately for readers, the heat of the journey still resonates on the printed page.
The Unlikely International Ambassador of Baseball
by Jim Benning | 05.04.06 | 11:18 PM ET
Kelsey Timmerman is not the first to write about travel and baseball in Latin America—the sport often pops up in stories about Cuba and the Dominican Republic, among other countries—but his essay in the Christian Science Monitor is the first I’ve seen about baseball on the small Honduran island of Kokota. That’s where, on a recent visit, he tried to teach a group of villagers how to play the game—a game, he admits, he never did like to play. As he writes near the top of the story, “I speak a little Spanish; most of the villagers do not. They speak Miskito. Let the charades begin.”
Hippies Gone? Yes. Inaccessible Via EasyJet? Yup. Welcome to the Latest Hipster Travel Destination.
by Michael Yessis | 05.04.06 | 7:00 PM ET
For the hipster, travel is merely an accessory. “The exclusivity of his cultural and geographical selection defines his personality, in much the same way that the suit he wears, the wristwatch he brandishes, or the car he drives defines him,” writes Simon Mills in an amusing story in the Guardian. Mills examines how a place becomes a hipster destination, and just how slippery that title can be in an age when information travels fast. He also gets inside a hipster traveler’s head and riffs.
Binyavang A Wainaina and the Cost of Internet Cafes
by Michael Yessis | 05.04.06 | 3:24 PM ET
World Hum books editor Frank Bures has a couple of interesting pieces in other publications this month. He interviewed Binyavang A Wainaina, founder of the magazine Kwani?, about the Kenyan literary scene and other topics for Tin House’s international issue, and looked at the cost of staying connected at Internet cafes around the world for Wired. Unfortunately, both are unavailable online.
No. 28: “Facing the Congo” by Jeffrey Tayler
by Rolf Potts | 05.04.06 | 12:29 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: 2000
Territory covered: Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Africa
Though “adventure” travel writing has come to the point where it often blurs with extreme sports coverage, Tayler’s chronicle of his 1995 pirogue trip down the Congo River proves that the most engrossing adventure tales don’t involve corporate sponsors and television crews. Frustrated with a dead-end life as a Moscow-based expatriate, the author travels to what was then Zaire to re-create British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the legendary Central African river in a dugout canoe. Tayler’s underlying impetus for the journey is to find meaning in his life by testing its limits—which proves to be no problem, as the author continually faces smothering heat, corrupt soldiers, lawlessness, hunger, swarms of insects, and a creeping sense of fear. Though Tayler occasionally illuminates moments of natural beauty, he never glosses over the reality of his journey, which is marked by an uncertain relationship with his guide, Desi, and ongoing suspicion from locals who, perhaps understandably, can’t understand why an outsider would want to submit himself to such a dangerous adventure. Drawn into Tayler’s heart of darkness, the reader feels the dread (and slaps at the mosquitoes) as the harrowing journey plays out.
No. 29: “Venture to the Interior” by Laurens van der Post
by Frank Bures | 05.03.06 | 11:40 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: 1952
Territory covered: Malawi
In 1949, while the world was still licking its war wounds, Laurens van der Post set off for the British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi) to map two mountains still unknown to cartographers. But his account of the trip is no mere expedition tale. Van der Post’s voice is devoid of machismo, even when one of his party members dies. Instead, his venture to the interior is more existential, and he isn’t afraid to muse in the manner of St. Exupery—a refreshing break from much of today’s vapid extreme outdoor culture. “I have always bought as little and made as few arrangements as possible,” he writes. The book has a resonance beyond its clean, quiet prose—a kind of melancholy self-reflection. In one instance, he asks, “Has there been another age that, knowing so clearly the right things to do, has so consistently done the wrong ones?” Reading this book is certainly one of the right ones.
Where’s Iraq?
by Jim Benning | 05.02.06 | 1:24 PM ET
Although we Americans are famously lacking in world geography knowledge, there has always been one surefire way we could learn a country’s place on the map: by attacking it, or at least intervening in its affairs. When that happens, our newspapers feature little regional maps with the country colored black, and our TV news shows offer up little glowing maps in the right-hand corner of our television screens. But now, sadly, even this extreme educational method is failing. Reports CNN: “After more than three years of combat and nearly 2,400 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, nearly two-thirds of Americans aged 18 to 24 still cannot find Iraq on a map, a study released Tuesday showed.”
On German Travelers, Goethe, Reisefieber and Wanderlust
by Jim Benning | 05.02.06 | 1:13 PM ET
Thomas Swick celebrates German travelers—“The world’s greatest travelers,” declares his column’s headline—in Sunday’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The urge to wander runs deep in the culture, he writes. “German, in fact, even has a word for the heightened anticipation one feels before a trip: reisefieber. Like knowing English has no word for putsch, it is a small linguistic jetway into national character.” Don’t miss the last line of the column—a terrific quote.
No. 30: “A Turn in the South” by V.S. Naipaul
by Tom Swick | 05.02.06 | 11:33 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: 1989
Territory covered: The American South
In deceptively simple prose conveying complex insights, the great novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul penetrates what may be the most impenetrable region of the United States. And he would seem to be the perfect chronicler of the place: a man who feels he doesn’t belong anywhere amidst people who feel they don’t belong anywhere else. Each of the seven chapters is devoted to a city or town—Atlanta, Charleston, Tallahassee, Tuskegee—and Naipaul is often helped in his understanding of each by a long-time resident who patiently, sagely, shows him around. Telling observations from the author are interspersed with long passages of reported speech. His almost ornithological fascination with spotting a “redneck” is balanced by his steadfast determination to look beyond the stereotypes. The last chapter, on North Carolina tobacco culture, is a masterpiece of meticulous reporting and illuminating reflection.
