Travel Journals

[KAY]

Has anyone read books by Josie Dew. She is fantastic. Ive just read wind through my whees and it is about her travelling from country to country by bicycle. She is in good spitit and humour and would be fun to be around. I learnt alot through her travels and on horrible cold wet days in england she took me with her on her journey. It was such an adventure. cant wait ti read some more.

[Freewheeling Andy]

Hmm. Cycling in England on horrible, cold, wet days? That sounds exactly how I'm going to be in an hour or so commuting to work.

 

I've never heard of Josie Dew, but that sounds very interesting. I enjoy reading travel writing - as in, people writing about their travels, rather than something like a rough guide.

 

It's an interesting genre, though, and hard to do well. Often it's too obsessed with the use of adjectives because the author doesn't really have too much to say about his subject. I came across a terrible example of this in a book by Colin Thubron, In Siberia, which could probably have been 40 pages long if he'd dropped all the "criss-crossing the landscape with a glimmering, shimmering beauty, like an icy spiders web which had trapped the landscape like a monstrous fly no longer able to escape from the watery embrace blah blah blah" nonsense.

 

Another area where writers often get it wrong is to know how much to go on about themselves. Sometimes you don't even know the author is there, so you get no idea at all about the journey, about the travelling, and the author only describes the landscape and the people, and this feels artificial to me; I like to know the author has problems with airports and punctures and so on, and sometimes when this is absent I wonder whether the author has gone in with a massive budget and travelled first class, with body guards, and has basically cheated; on the other hand the writer who is completely self-obsessed and writes entirely about themselves (I fear the newer breed of celebrity travel writer is slightly guilty) pushes the emphasis too far the other way.

 

The ideal travel writing for me should be: A bit of the author struggling to make the journey; some humour; a genuine sympathy for the places he's travelling through; interaction with the locals, but not described in too patronising a way; some history and social commentary on the areas being travelled through; possibly some description of the geography and natural history, too.

 

Last year I read a book with the author travelling through the Sahel, and the subject is fascinating and journey difficult. But the book was just not enjoyable to read because too many of the places being travelled though were just too bleak, and the people inhabiting the areas a bit too unsympathetic, and he always seemed happy to move on and away. When there appears to be almost no love for the place visited it's just not warm.

 

So, what do I like? I have absolutely loved Eric Newby, and particularly A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, a hilarious description of his attempt to climb a mountain in Afganistan with no experience at all; and also on the Afghanistan side, Robert Byron's legendary The Road To Oxiana (although he does go on a bit about architecture). More recently, William Dalrymple's books are always excellent, although his first, In Xanadu, is possible the most fun as it doesn't come so laden with history and is him trying to complete the route of Marco Polo's journey in a university holiday. Patrick Leigh Fermor's two classics, The Time Of Gifts, and Between the Woods and The Water, describing his decision to leave dissolute thirties London, and then walking from The Hague to Istanbul as a way of getting some focus, heading through the rise of Nazi Germany and seeing the end of the real mixing of peoples in central Europe, are magnificent and poignant (although sometimes a bit adjective laden). And Fitzroy Maclean's Eastern Approaches borders on travel writing, particularly when he describes his romps around The Caucauses and Central Asia avoiding Stalin's NKVD/KGB. Back in the more modern era, I really enjoyed Jonathan Raban's Old Glory, where he travels down the navigable Mississippi in a small boat in the early 80s.

[kateleopald]

If you like the cycling theme then try It's Not About the Tapas by Polly Evans.