Category Archives: Travel

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

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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.