Category Archives: Travel

The Places in Between: Rory Stewart

15 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

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Rory Stewart had set out to walk from Iran all the way to Nepal—through Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. But in December 2000, when the Iranian government took away his visa, the Taliban refused to allow him to enter Afghanistan. So Stewart had to go directly to Pakistan. At the end of 2001, when he heard that the Taliban had fallen, he decided to return to Afghanistan and walk from Herat in the west of the country to Kabul. He took a shorter route through the mountains, even though it was during the middle of winter.

However, before he can begin his journey, Stewart has to explain to the Afghan Security Services why he is walking across the country and reassure them that he is not spying for the UK government. “It is mid-winter—there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves and there is a war”, the man from the Security Services tells him. “You will die, I can guarantee. Do you want to die?” Stewart is finally allowed to continue, but only on condition that two men from the Security Services accompany him for part of the way. Stewart knows that it would not go down well in the villages where he would be spending the nights, but there is nothing he can do about it.

This is a fascinating account. Stewart is always aware of the juxtaposition of history with the present. Herat, once “a great medieval market for China, Turkey, and Persia…was now selling Chinese alarms clocks, Turkish sunglasses and Iranian apple juice”. Throughout his book he quotes the Baburnama—written by the first Mughal emperor, Babur, about his journey from Afghanistan to India in the early 16th century—thus connecting Babur’s time with ours.

Stewart is not always welcome in the villages. War has led to a mistrust of strangers. Fortunately, he speaks enough Dari (one of the Afghan languages) to hold conversations with the men he meets (and it is almost always men). He speaks with Afghans who fought in the wars that began in the late 1970s, first during the Russian invasion and then during the civil war.

Politics in Afghanistan is never straightforward. The headman of a village he stays in had been a military commander for 24 years, first fighting the Russians with a group funded by Pakistani intelligence and then with a group funded partially by the British. “Then the Russians withdrew and he fought the pro-Russian Najib government and the rival Northern Alliance groups. When the Taliban took over the province five years earlier, he decided, he said, to ‘retire from fighting’. This probably meant that he had been the Taliban commander in the area but would deny it if I asked him.”

Eventually, the two security men leave Stewart, but he acquires a new friend—a dog the size of a small pony, given to him by villagers, whom he names Babur. Man and dog then help each other through blizzards and snow drifts.

And then there is the landscape, which changes all the time, from deep snow on the mountains to this: “We walked on through hills whose brilliant colours showed metal ores in the soil: a rock face striped like candy, a crest of snow-softened russet, then slopes of green and orange sandstone, and finally, a cliff streaked with bull’s blood red.”

This book is important, coming at a time when the world knows so little about Afghanistan excerpt for the wars and the bombings.

I lived in Afghanistan as a child in the early 1970s, before the Russians invaded. My memories are of a beautiful, rugged country and a warm and hospitable—and fiercely independent—people. But the scars left by decades of war are going to take a long time to heal. There were times in this book when I could barely recognize the country I had known.

The walk across Afghanistan really brings home just how diverse the country and its people are: the various tribes, languages and landscapes. Stewart does not romanticize any of this but tries to portray the country and its people with honesty and empathy. I just hope that this magnificent land will find peace someday.

Three Ways to Capsize a Boat: An Optimist Afloat—Chris Stewart

10 Sunday Feb 2019

Posted by in Humour, Non-Fiction, Travel

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It all began when Chris Stewart, 29 and out of work, bumps into a friend. “My great-aunt Jane has been on at me for weeks to find her a skipper [for her yacht], and I thought of you straightaway.” Which was a little odd because Stewart had never been on a boat before, never mind knowing how to sail. But he needed the job so he decided to keep minor details like that to himself.

A book, Teach Yourself Sailing, teaches him the jargon and how to tell one boat from another. He hopes this would be enough to impress grand-aunt Jane at their first meeting. (It is.) He is to pick up the boat, a Cornish Crabber, from a marina near Athens where it was being fixed by a Captain Bob Weare. He is to sail it to the island of Spetses, where Jane and her husband Bob would spend the summer. A dream job—provided Stewart could actually sail a boat.

He enlists the help of Keith, a “rather malodorous person with a black beard [and] a chubby boyish face” who has a crush on Stewart’s girlfriend, Ana, and who owns a boat, a “twenty-one-foot craft banged together out of plywood and tin”. All does not go well. There is thick fog and the boat capsizes, pitching them into the freezing sea. Fortunately, Keith knows how to right the boat by standing on it, and they survive.

Classes with a professional sailor, Tom Cunliffe, give Stewart enough knowledge to go to Athens with some confidence. He finds the Crabber in a terrible state—mouldy and without an engine. Stewart rescues it from Captain Bob and hands it over to two Greeks, both called Nikos. When Stewart worries that the keys are still with Captain Bob, one of the Nikos points out: “Keys are for engine. You got no engine.” Problem solved. New engine, new keys.

By the time Stewart has finished his stint with Jane, he is hooked on sailing. When Cunliffe asks if he would join his crew to sail to Newfoundland, Stewart jumps at it. They set out from Brighton on a rainy day in April, via Norway and Greenland. It is the first time that Stewart was going to be on a boat for weeks on end. He describes living on a boat: sharing a small space with other people (including Cunliffe’s wife and four-year-old daughter) in a small space, keeping watches at night while trying not to fall asleep, the cold, and the comforting tones of the shipping forecast. (And a very funny bit about trying to pee from the side of the ship in the freezing cold.)

They stop in a little town called Norheimsund, in Norway. The already stunning landscape of the fjords is heightened with white apple blossoms “as if bright patches of snow had lingered in the warm green valleys”. Norway is expensive so they live on fish they catch. A group of Norwegian men who come over for a night of drinking are horrified by this, and bring them enough smoked leg of lamb to last for the rest of the journey (which Stewart suspects wasn’t obtained entirely legally).

I love Stewart’s writing: he’s funny and lyrical and his vivid descriptions makes you feel you are there. And you can tell why people do get hooked on sailing: “as the land drops away astern, all the woes and worries that afflicted you on dry land—all the things you ought to have done but have left undone, all the drab detritus and clutter of your daily existence—slough away like the old dry skin of a snake”.

Chris Stewart is best known for the books he has written about living in Alpujarras in Andalucia, Spain,[1] and for briefly being a drummer in Genesis. I am so glad they kicked him out—it would have been a real loss to the book world if he was still drumming!

[1] See my reviews of his books: A Parrot in the Pepper Tree on this blog and Driving Over Lemons for Women on the Road (scroll down to the bottom of the page: it was the first one I wrote for the website!).

Women travellers tell their stories

23 Monday Jul 2018

Posted by in Book lists, Non-Fiction, Travel

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Think of all the travel books that you have read: how many of them are written by men? Almost all? And yet women have been travelling and writing about it for as long as men. As a reviewer for the website, Women on the Road, I have spent the last few years reading these books. And it has been a delight to discover their rich variety. Some women take off on solo adventures, while others travel with friends or partners; some explore far-flung places and others focus on where they live.

I would like introduce you to some of my favourites. They cover the five continents and are in a variety of styles. What the books have in common is that they go off the beaten track and try to capture the soul of a place.

Almost all the links lead to my reviews on Women on the Road. It’s been hard to pick just a few (I whittled them down to a baker’s dozen) but I hope this list will tempt you to not only read the ones I have recommended but to actively look for travel books by women.

Note: The reviews on Women on the Road are split according to regions. I have highlighted one book per page and listed a few more that can be found on the same page, indicating where they are relative to the highlighted book.

A Short Ride through the Jungle: The Ho Chi Minh Trail by Motorcycle by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent
This is one of my favourite kinds of books (you will find a few more like this on this list): an intrepid woman travelling on her own. In this case, Antonia Bolingbroke bikes the Ho Chi Minh trail, combining her experiences with its history. She follows the trail through Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos, navigating through jungles and unexploded bombs.

Also on this page (scroll down for the first two; A Revolutionary Ride is at the top of the page)
Indonesia etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani
Pisani crosses the breadth of this country of 13,466 islands. She speaks the language and is therefore able to communicate with the people, even in remote areas.

Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea by Kira Salak
This book is an attempt to understand Papua New Guinea, a country that is not a typical travel destination. Salak visits its interior, walking through almost impenetrable jungles and not letting trivial things like fever get in the way.

A Revolutionary Ride: On the Road in Search of the Real Iran by Lois Pryce
Pryce rides her motorcycle from Iran’s border with Turkey to Shiraz during a time of tense relations between the UK and Iran. As a woman travelling alone in Iran, she worries about her reception but finds the people welcoming and supportive (except for the Revolutionary Guard, who are less impressed with her feat).

Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa
Noo Saro-Wiwa is Ken Saro-Wiwa’s daughter. After her father’s assassination, Saro-Wiwa swears that she will never go back to Nigeria, a promise she keeps for several years. Then she decides to give the country another chance and spends five months there, taking in the ancient Nok sculptures (1000 BC­–500 AD), meeting Nollywood directors and talking to ordinary Nigerians. A portrait of a country from someone who is an insider and an outsider at the same time (something many expats will identify with).

Also on this page (scroll up):
All Strangers are Kin: Adventures in Arabic and the Arab World by Zora O’Neill
O’Neill journeys to Egypt, the Gulf states, Lebanon and Morocco to practice her Arabic and understand their culture and customs. This is not just a travelogue but a linguistic journey and a glimpse into an ancient region that is now in flux.

The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice by Polly Coles
Coles moves to Venice with her husband and three children and writes about what it means to live in a major tourist destination. How do Venetians cope with the vast numbers of people trooping through their city? Funny and insightful.

Also on this page (scroll down):
Forward: Letters Written on a Trip around the World by Lina Boegli
Published in 1905, this is a collection of letters written by a Swiss woman, Lina Boegli, to her friend during her 10-year sojourn through Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, Hawaii (an independent country at the time) and the United States. To support herself, Boegli works as she travels. It is inspiring to know that women had been doing this over a century ago.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson
Davidson—yet another intrepid woman—crosses Australia with her dog and three camels (actually four camels: one of them is pregnant). Everything you want to know about camels but were afraid to ask. I love her descriptions of the desert and her encounters with the Aborigines.

Also on this page (scroll down):
Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica by Sara Wheeler
Wheeler goes to Antarctica partly out of curiosity and partly to explore a “landscape of the mind”: a place that is desolate that you are forced to face yourself. Fascinating portrait of a region with no native people and scarcely any wildlife.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
Strayed loses her mother and as a way of coping with her grief and facing down her demons, she decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, albeit with more determination than experience. She loses toenails and a hiking boot but makes it through—both physically and emotionally—with her trusty rucksack, Monster.

Sliced Iguana: Travels in Mexico by Isabella Tree
In this book, Tree brings together the country’s past and present, looking for the “hidden Mexico”. She visits floating gardens in Mexico City, participates in a peyote ceremony in Chiapas and finds a feisty matriarchal society in Juchitan.

Also on this page (scroll up):
Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker
And now for something completely different: this is not a travelogue in the strict sense, but a new way of looking at a city. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of New Orleans, ranging from carnival routes to where slave pens used to be, and the best places to eat oysters. Each chapter is accompanied by an attractive map. Beautifully produced, this book builds a multifaceted picture of the city.

Photo from Pxhere.com

Terra Australis: Great Adventures in the Circumnavigation of Australia—Matthew Flinders, ed. Tim Flannery

20 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Autobiography / Biography / Memoir, Non-Fiction, Travel

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I first heard of Matthew Flinders in July 2014 when a friend, Heather Wicks, told me that she was going to London for the unveiling of his statue. Flinders was her fourth great-uncle, who had been the first European to sail around Australia. That piqued my curiosity, so she lent me this book.

Matthew Flinders spent most of his life sailing around Australia, and gave it its name. He was the first to circumnavigate Tasmania, then known as Van Diemen’s Land. Flinders spent several years in Australia, finally returning home to his wife, Anne in 1810 after being imprisoned in Mauritius for over six years. (A letter to her is included at the end of this book.) He spent three years writing his diaries but died before he could see them in print. Tim Flannery has edited his diaries into a single volume and written an excellent introduction.

Flinders was born in England in 1774. He decided as a boy that he was going to sea, and by 1789, he was working for the British navy. His first voyage to Australia was in 1794, when he signed up to go on the Reliance to Botany Bay. The crew included a surgeon, George Bass, and the two men shared “an ardour for discovery”. Once the ship had docked in Port Jackson in Australia, they set off to explore the coastline in an 8-foot ship called Tom Thumb. The entire crew comprised the two men and a boy. Over the years, the ships Flinders used to explore the coastline grew bigger in size until he was put in charge of Lady Nelson, a brig of 60 tons in May 1802, an indication of Britain’s growing interest in exploring the continent.

Australia became Flinders’s passion. A few months after the Reliance had docked in London, Flinders was on another ship, the Investigator, heading back to Australia. It was on this second trip, when Flinders was circumnavigating Tasmania, that he encountered the man who was to be his rival, the French captain Nicolas Baudin. The two men—and two countries—vied with each other to discover more about the continent. As the French first lieutenant jokes to Flinders, “If we had not been kept so long picking up shells and catching butterflies in Van Dieman’s Land, you would not have discovered the south coast before us.”

But of course, the land was not “discovered” by the Europeans—the aborigines had been there for a long, long time before. Flinders writes about his meetings with the aborigines, which were, on the whole, friendly. He tries to see through their eyes and imagines how he would react to strangers, “so different in complexion and appearance”. However, not all these encounters went so well. In 1802, a misunderstanding led to a scuffle between the crew and the aborigines, leading to an aborigine being shot—unfortunately, not the last time this happened.

Flinders writes in great detail about the trips, describing the land, its flora and fauna. He lists the supplies they carried and how much they cost. This book is not a quick read but it really gives a sense of what it must have been like to be on those journeys. We live in a time when it feels like we have seen everything, either actually or virtually. These diaries recapture the sense of wonder of seeing something for the first time. They are also an important chapter in the history of Australia.

Deep South: Paul Theroux

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

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Like Paul Theroux, travellers often go in search of adventure in other countries before exploring their own. Having travelled to remote corners throughout the world, he sets out to discover a part of his own country—the United States—that he knows mostly through its fiction.

The Deep South of the US is a cultural subregion and comprises the southeast corner of the country, the states that were dependent on plantations and slavery during the pre–Civil War period. History is alive and well there. As someone points out, the past “isn’t even past”. Some of the African-Americans Theroux meets remember their grandparents talking about slavery. So it’s not far away, after all. And although things have changed, racism does rear its ugly head.

Theroux decides to avoid the cities and stick to the rural areas to get a better sense of the real Deep South. He goes to small towns and settlements so tiny that they do not exist on the map (“you gotta be going there to get there”). Because the South is a three-day drive from his home in Connecticut, he is able to return time and again. The trip keeps looping in on itself, which means that he has more time to understand the area and see how it has changed.

The shocking fact that comes through is the level of poverty, and this in a so-called rich country. He drives through areas of stunning natural beauty dotted with towns abandoned or barely getting by. He finds “bank deserts”—areas where there were no banks, so people could not get loans or open bank accounts, something Theroux had not seen, not even in the remotest parts of Asia. And when there was a bank, the poor felt too intimated to go in. A lot of the destitution has to do with manufacturing moving out of the US, putting people out of jobs. There does not seem to have been much effort put into creating alternative jobs for them, so they end up sinking below the poverty line.

Theroux meets a wide variety of people, the desperately poor, intellectuals and farmers, who tell him about how difficult it is for black farmers to get loans. But there is incredible resilience, and those who can try to help their fellow citizens—buying bankrupt banks and restoring them for the poor; and helping with housing and food. And all this without much help from the state. And through the portraits of these people, you get a real sense of the place. Theroux has obviously fallen in love with the warmth, hospitality and strength of its people, so it’s no surprise that he chooses to go back.

Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela—Conrad Rudolph

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in Travel

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Pilgrimage to the end of the worldAt a time when more and more people are moving away from religion, this book takes you back to the essence of faith. Conrad Rudolph is not particularly religious, but decides to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, walking all the way, staying in gîtes and refugios. He writes about what it really means to go on a pilgrimage and how it can transform people. There is no overt religiosity here, but a sense of spirituality, of being able to step out of the fast-rushing current of modern life into the simplicity of an earlier era, with time to be alone with your thoughts.

Rudolph starts walking from Le Puys, in south-central France to Finisterre—literally, the end of the world—which is just beyond Santiago de Compostela. It takes him two and a half months of walking in rain, wind and searing heat, starting in the Massif Central in France and going over the Pyrenees, through areas where there isn’t another human being for miles around. Through all this, Rudolph maintains a strong sense of history. He situates his journey in the tradition of pilgrimage, especially during the Middle Ages, when hundreds of European pilgrims took to the road. It was the biggest adventure they could undertake: people walked for months, and sometimes years, to see relics of saints and hoping for miracle cures.

This sense of continuity, the melding of past and present, and the experience of progressing towards a destination rather than actually arriving there, are what Rudolph considers the hallmarks of a pilgrimage. It is also a retreat: over time, your mind begins to slow down—you stop making lists of things to do or think about what had happened last week, and start to be in tune with your surroundings, noticing phases of the moon and details of the landscape around you.

The author describes his pilgrimage in a series of vignettes, which gives you a greater feel for his journey than any detailed description might have done. A beggar in Santiago gives Rudolph an impromptu lecture on the sculptures in the church before going back to his spot to beg; a Spanish farmer opens a church for Rudolph and his fellow pilgrims in spite of being forbidden to do so by the priest; and people everywhere extend small kindnesses, slipping in an extra apple or inviting him in for a meal.

The author walks mostly alone, falling in with other pilgrims on the way. His descriptions of the journey are lyrical. There are moments during the journey when the past merges with the present—part of his walk takes him on an old Roman road, now overgrown. He watches an old man cutting grass in the early morning fog with a two-handed scythe, in almost mystical quiet. “What there is is enormous silence and solitude. And the result of all this…was a sense of timelessness, or very slowly moving time; the sensation of a timelessness of progress, that time and distance, the seemingly basic components of all travel, no longer played a leading role in the journey.”

I love this idea, that in the middle of our constant rushing around, brains on overdrive, you can find again this sense of timelessness, and a spirituality that is greater than any one religion, but springs from something very deep within us.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail: Cheryl Strayed

28 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by in Non-Fiction, Travel

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This is an amazing book about a woman’s journey to heal herself. Cheryl Strayed’s world collapses when she loses her beloved mother to cancer. Her marriage to a man she loves breaks up. And without her mother to hold them together, her family drifts apart. When her divorce comes through, she chooses the surname Strayed because that’s exactly how she feels.

One day at a gas station, she buys a book on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. This impulsive act is the start of a momentous journey. It takes a few years for her to finally decide to do it—alone. She  is not an experienced hiker but what she has in buckets is the sheer determination to see it through. Her rucksack is so heavy that she is barely able to lift it off the ground, which earns it the name Monster. She loses six toenails to the trail, as
well as her hiking boots, one of which goes over the edge of a ravine. Not to be deterred, she duct tapes flip flops to her feet and walks to the next town.

With Monster her only constant companion, Strayed hikes over a thousand miles from the Mojave desert to the border between Oregan and Washington State through snow, deserts and forests. She is unflinchingly honest, both about her weakness and the pain—both emotional and physical—that she goes through. She writes so vividly that you feel like you’re on the hike with her. You feel her pain (I found myself checking my toenails!), and delight with her in luxuries like a shower, a bottle of soda and a proper hot meal.

Strayed describes the people she meets on the trail with a lot of warmth. Her fellow hikers, whom she keeps running into on the trail, become good friends. She is amazed by the kindness of complete strangers, including people she sometimes hitches rides with. By the time she reaches the end of her journey and collapses on bench with a well-deserved ice-cream, she is exhausted, her feet are wrecked, but she is stronger both physically and emotionally, having worked through her anguish and faced off her demons.