Mar

7

The Long And Winding Road.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

March 7, 2007 |

What would you do if you won the lottery? Pay off bills, fix up the house, and send the kids to college. Those are all noble ideas, but what’s the one thing you’d really love to do, something you’ve put off doing or never had the chance to pursue? I’d travel.

I’m probably never going to win the lottery, especially since I never bother to buy a ticket, and I have traveled, but there are places that are too remote or too expensive that I may never see. That’s where travelogues come in. Travelogues give us a chance to see exotic, or mundane, locations through the eyes of other travelers. While the best travel memoir could never replace the real thing, a good travel story can be almost as much of a trip as the real thing. Here are a few great books that will allow you to hop around the globe by just reaching over to your bedside table:

borneo.jpgStranger In The Forest by Eric Hansen (Houghton Mifflin, 1988) is a book about exactly the kind of travel I’d like to do: no strings attached, no fellow tourists, no schedules, and serious risk. In the tropics a paper cut can easily turn to septicemia and gangrene, but Hansen is a hilariously easygoing traveler. After a night of boozing with longhouse residents, Hansen left Borneo then returned with a simple plan: cross the third largest island in the world, divided between three countries, on foot. Most of the trip was made with native Penan guides, but occasionally Hansen found himself walking through the forest alone, which is unbelievably dangerous in a place where even the natives travel in pairs. He took very little with him aside from a duffel bag full of shotgun shells which he used for bartering and to pay his guides. Although smart for practical reasons, the shotgun shells also spelled potential trouble for Hansen on his 1,500 mile trip. Hansen didn’t just write a travelogue: he captured a Borneo that was disappearing as he crossed it. The native Penan were affected by uncontrolled logging, and Hansen was there to see how quickly a place so remote and, to Western minds, alien, can be changed and lost forever. Hansen also wrote Motoring With Mohammed: Journeys To Yemen And The Red Sea (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), The Traveler: An American Odyssey In The Himalayas (Sierra Club Books, 1993), Orchid Fever (Pantheon Books, 2000), The Bird Man And The Lap Dancer (Pantheon Books, 2004), and, most recently, Hiking Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Globe Pequot Press, 2005).

A lighter collection is I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long (RDR Books, 1996). ivebeengone.jpg

The book’s subtitle really sums it up: Field Trip Fiascoes And Expedition Disasters. Sometimes I think I should have taken up a career in biology or anthropology, and enjoyed those “field research” trips to hike, snorkel, and kick back on remote beaches with a Mai Tai. On second thoughts maybe it’s better I didn’t take up that dream job. I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long includes researchers’ experiences with some of the most dangerous things ever encountered in the field: hyraxes, Land Rovers, and Dian Fossey. Not to mention the giant cockroaches, the bushmasters, and gun-toting poachers. A follow-up to I Should Have Stayed Home (Book Passage Press, 1996), a collection of writers’ worst travel experiences (including Eric Hansen), I’ve Been Gone Far Too Long reveals why people put their lives on the line to study everything from alpine botany to African buffalo. There’s nothing like bringing knowledge into the light, or succeeding in the face of such serious dangers. And it’s tremendous fun.

Travel isn’t always about crossing an island or doing serious research, though. Sometimes travel can be about self-discovery as much as it can be about discovering other places. Although she was already beginning to discover herself, leaving her emotionally distant boyfriend in California and flying off to Europe, at the beginning of her memoir Incognito Street: How Travel Made Me A Writer (Seal Press, 2006) Barbara Sjoholm was living in a literary fantasy world, hoping for something “Dickensian” and working hard to become a writer. incognito.jpg (Thanks to Colleen Mondor of Bookslut for bringing this book to my attention.) Incognito Street is not a travelogue, or even a how-to for aspiring writers, but a memoir that subtly blends both. As she describes her travels she offers tantalizing details and short bits of history about Southern Spain, Norway, and Morocco, and provides quick impressions of the big cities like London, Barcelona, Paris, and Oslo, giving more attention to the people she met than the local tourist spots. Accompanied part of the time by her friend Laura, Sjoholm hitchhiked and stayed in cheap hotels. It’s a Europe that, because of the Euro and globalization, doesn’t exist anymore. During these travels she also struggled to become a writer, and is very honest about her fears. At one point she says,

As soon as I began to read as a writer, I saw the enormous gulf that existed between me and the authors I so intensely admired. As soon as I began comparing myself, I grew paralyzed and lost my previous innocent hubris. As soon as I realized that writing was a craft and that all writers had different styles, I grew frightened. What was my style? How did you get one?

This is a psychological place, not a geographical one, but anyone who’s really wanted to be a writer has been here. Her growing confidence as she moves from just keeping journals to stories, is reassuring. Even though she’s writing in past tense, it is a tense past, full of risks and doubts and uncertainties. Sjoholm pushed on and became an accomplished writer whose books include not just Incognito Street, but another travel book, The Pirate Queen (Seal Press, 2004). She also, under the name Barbara Wilson, has written a series of mysteries, including The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (Seal Press, 2000), The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman (Third Side Press, 1998), and Gaudi Afternoon (Seal Press, 2001), which was made into a movie. Sjoholm also became a successful translator and co-founder of Seal Press.

There’s no specific map to becoming a writer, just as no two people could travel through the same trail and have the same experiences. Ultimately that’s what writing, and travel, are all about. Travelogues benefit from the intimacy of the first-person narrative: we get to tag along both through the territory and inside the heads of writers. We get a chance to learn about places we may never go, places we can never go, and the occasional thrill of recognition hearing someone else’s experiences of a place we know. There’s comfort in knowing someone else has been a stranger in a strange land. It reminds us to enjoy the trip.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. John on March 13, 2007 1:06 pm

    Right on! Hey, what happened to the beer of the week thing? Nothing better than drinking, travelling and writing about it so that later you can…..read and drink.

  2. Around The World And Back Again. :: Just Write on February 12, 2008 11:22 am

    […] Q & A with writer David Farley, he talks about travel and the new series. Few of us will be lucky enough to travel as much as Palin has, and, surprisingly, all that travel hasn’t made him bitter or cynical. […]

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