The Best Women's Travel Writing 2006 Edited by Lucy McCauley

The essays in this collection come in two varieties:

1. A woman (or women) face a physical challenge such as running river rapids in Oregon, getting caught in a flood in Malaysia, or getting thrown from a bus in Tibet. The women survive, and are stronger for their experience.

2. A woman (or women) face a mental challenge such as missing the bus in Oaxaca, going to cooking school in Australia, or behaving properly at a wedding in Mongolia. The women survive, and are stronger for their experience.

I cannot imagine a more formulaic batch of essays than the ones in this volume. Skip the book and just make one up for yourself (choose one item from each set of parentheses):

“A woman who has recently (undergone a divorce/ survived breast cancer/ left her career as a management consultant) decides to travel alone to (Bhutan/ California/ Argentina/ Denmark). While there she (gets lost/ meets a sexy Frenchman/ encounters bandits/ is hit by a car). As she recovers from her (injuries/ love affair/ brush with the law) she learns to appreciate her (resourcefulness/ access to clean water/ health insurance)."

If these essays are the best women’s travel writing of 2006, then all I can say is that 2006 was a bad year for travel writing.

(Book 8, 2006)

8:55 to Baghdad by Andrew Eames

Did you think this was a book about politics and war? Guess again. It’s a travel narrative of the author’s journey to Baghdad, via railway, as he recreates similar journeys taken by Agatha Christie beginning in 1928. She traveled via the Orient Express and her journeys through the Middle East provided fodder for several of her novels, including Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death.

Eames was inspired to make this trip after learning of Christie’s fondness for a certain hotel in Aleppo, Turkey from the mother of the hotel’s current proprietor. Initially unaware of Christie’s long association with Turkey and Iraq (mostly through her husband, archeologist Max Mallowan), he researched her interest, and devised this trip as both homage to Christie, and also to satisfy his own curiosity about the history of rail travel through the Middle East.

Of course the trip wasn't as easy or as luxurious as it was in Christie's day, when upper class Britons traveled frequently through the area, which was ruled by British mandate. Eames's journey was more circuitous, and ran the gamut from posh to problematic. Though he began his journey on the now-restored Venice-Simplon Orient Express, he could only get as far as Venice by this method, and was forced to make due with far less opulent modes of transportation for the remainder of the trip. His train ride through Bulgaria, past polluted lakes and the remnants of Soviet industrialization efforts was the low point. And in truth it is no longer possible to go all the way to Baghdad via rail; once he reached Syria, the only possible way to get to Iraq was to join up with a bus filled with tourists on a guided (and heavily guarded) tour of Iraqi archeological sites.

With his tour group, Eames visited the Ziggurat at Ur, where Christie first met Mallowan. I liked this part of the book best because I've been interested in Near Eastern art and archeology ever since I took Archeology 101, taught by the redoubtable Machteld Mellink, an honor which I failed to appreciate at the age of 18 but which fills me with pride now. This book was for me a perfect combination of lots of things I'm interested in; in addition to archeology it's got British colonial history, train travel, and literary anecdotes.

Eames made his journey in 2002, before the American invasion, and reported that Iraqi citizens were wary, but still friendly, and that life in Iraq seemed fairly normal. It's depressing to think about the changes since then. Many of the sites that Eames visited have sustained great damage, and are now inaccessible to archeologists and historians. (The plight of the Iraqi citizens is of course an even greater tragedy.)

(Book 32, 2007)

Jetlag Travel Guides

I said in my post the other day that I would write about these books, because Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s book made me think of them. I haven’t read one recently, but I enjoy them so much that it’s fun to talk about them. Jetlag Travel Guides is a series written by the Australian team of Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch, and they are send-ups of the culturally sensitive adventure travel guides of the sort offered by Lonely Planet, for example. The books are brilliant satire, employing time-tested travel book formulas like “Where to stay” (the Holidaj Injn in Bardjov) and “Where to eat” (NOT at the Svateho, unless you want to eat sheep scrotum) along with color photographs of the locals (with captions like “When dining in certain parts of Southern Molvania it is considered rude to ask for cutlery”) and detailed maps of the region. Even the tiniest details are correct, and hysterical, like the tag line for Jetlag Travel Guides: Taking you Places You Don’t Want to Go.

We own two of the titles: Molvania, about a pretend Eastern European country, “a land untouched by modern dentistry,” and Phaic Tan (say it out loud), about a fictional Pacific rim nation: “sunstroke on a shoestring.” I see now that a third one has come out: San Sombrero: a land of carnivals, cocktails, and coups. I can't wait. It’s the job of our 13-year-old to read these books aloud, cover to cover, to anyone who will listen, often following family members from room to room saying “listen to this, listen to this.” We can’t get enough of them.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off: The Yarn Harlot's Guide to the Land of Knitting

This book was not nearly as funny as her earlier endeavor, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, which I read and reviewed back in February. This one is supposed to be a travel book, where we travel to the Land of Knitting. It pales in comparison to other travel book parodies: the best of these are the Jet Lag series of travel books (more about these later). But writing a travel book parody wasn't exactly what Pearl-McPhee was setting out to do: the format is just a framing devise that allows her to write more about her favorite topic: knitting and knitters and why knitters "get" one another in a way that non-knitters do not (they speak the same language, enjoy the same customs, etc.; thus the knitter-land metaphor). I'm sure there are similar books out there for other sub-cultures that like to stick together, golfers maybe? (Anyone know of any golf-land books?)

I kept waiting for Casts Off to get as funny as The Secret Life (or as funny as the daily content delivered on Pearl-McPhee's blog) but it never did. It did, however, provide a strange sort of comfort as I read it at bedtime. Try as I might to go back to the two novels I've got going, I kept picking this up instead. Pearl-McPhee makes a strong case for the power of community and shared values of knitters everywhere, and I kept feeling like I wanted to be part of it.

But speaking of travel book parodies, has anyone else read and enjoyed the Jetlag Travel Guide series (written by the team of Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner, and Rob Sitch) as much as my family has? I’ll write another post about them tomorrow.

(Book 23, 2007)

The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost

A while ago I wrote something about novels that really should have been short stories, in that they lacked enough plot to justify their length. This was a travel book that should have been a travel essay. Troost’s girlfriend is posted to the Pacific island nation of Kiribati as the coordinator of some agricultural humanitarian organization; Troost tags along and tries to write a novel, but seems to spend most of his time surfing and drinking Australian beer; much hilarity ensues.

Kiribati consists of 33 atolls strung out along the equator. It is overpopulated and hot, there is nothing to eat but fish, it has no working waste disposal arrangements so dirty diapers foul the lagoon, and occasionally the beer runs out. Troost’s meandering mixture of history, culture, and silliness meant that I never actually got why things were so bad there but it has something to do with the usual suspects: the British and the American governments, both of whom performed nuclear testing on some of the outlying atolls and took all the phosphate deposits, or something.

I guess if you find this in a used book store, or someone lends it to you, you might get a kick out of parts of it. It spent the better part of a month languishing on my night table, where I read it between starting and stopping other books. I finished it yesterday, a day I spent mostly in bed with a drippy cold, where the book’s lack of focus and lopsided humor kind of appealed to me.

(Book 2, 2007)

The Best American Travel Writing, 2000, Post #2

Several weeks ago I wrote about this book. I had listened to an abridged version on CD. I complained because I thought that the CD didn't include enough essays. I remember that I felt (and implied) that they should have released an unabridged CD version as well, complete with every essay.

After getting a copy of the unabridged print version of this book, I have changed my mind. There is such a thing as too much. I spent several weeks plowing through the remaining essays, of which there seemed to be hundreds. All the situations and experiences have run together in my head into one big scenario. Kidnapped in Kenya? Wait, no, kidnapped in Thailand. Hitchhiking in Ivory Coast? Yes, and also hitchhiking in Morocco, and again in Australia. Picking up hitchhikers in Cuba.

I have concluded that the best essays were indeed the ones that were included on the audio CD; the rest, with one exception, were pretty forgettable. I remember writing in my first post that I wanted to read the essay about the Australian truck driver who delivers fuel to Cape York Peninsula, at the top of Queensland. That essay was excellent: funny and original, and it should have been included on the CD. The rest were mostly one big boondoggle.

The Best American Travel Writing, 2000 Edited by Bill Bryson

I listened to the audio CD version of this. I was excited, because the container (and the Amazon.com description) said "unabridged" and my complaint about these collections is that they are always too short. I listened to it intermittently over the course of about two weeks, and finished it yesterday, and before writing this, I looked it up on Amazon to refresh my memory about some of the essays. But on Amazon I came across a reference to the essay about driving across Australia with the world's toughest trucker. And another reference to an essay about being kidnapped by Ugandan rebels! Wait, I didn't hear those! I want to hear those too! What happened? I looked the book up on the library's web site, and then I noticed this statement: "unabridged selections." Aahhh. Now I see. The essays themselves are not abridged, they just don't INCLUDE ALL OF THEM!

Why do they think listeners want the quickie version? I don't get it. Anyway, the essays that you DO get to hear on this are wonderful, except for an annoying one by David Halberstam about all the rich people who are moving to Nantucket and building McMansions, like I care. I fast-forwarded through that one. My favorite is by Dave Eggers about picking up hitchhikers in Cuba.

Now I just have to find the print version and read about that Australian trucker. I love this kind of thing.

(Book 20, 2006)

The Best American Travel Writing, 2002, Edited by Frances Mayes

I've always been attracted to this series "The Best American ...." (short stories, essays, etc.) but have never stuck with any of the volumes. I think it goes back to my distaste for short stories. I don't like all the starting and stopping. But when I have tried the collections, I've been impressed by the high quality. I guess, if they're going to call them "the best" they had better be good.

Late last year, after I got my MP3 player, I tried listening to one collection of travel essays (Best of 2003) and found that to be the perfect delivery system. The starting and stopping bothers me less in an audiobook. And if you lose the thread a little, you can start over again with the next essay. This collection (2002) was as good as the 2003 collection. My only complaint is that the audiobooks are abridged collections. There are probably only about a third of the essays that appeared in the print volume. I wonder why they don't provide all of them. I would happily listen to them all.

The best essays in this volume were Forty Years in Acapulco by Devin Friedman, a moving essay about the author's grandfather and his annual trip to Mexico, and In the Land of the White Rajahs by Lawrence Millman, about Borneo. The essay is reprinted here, on the Islands magazine site: http://www.islands.com/articles/f02032001.asp?island=borneo.

I'm getting more and more interested in reading and listening to travel writing, and have put other travelogues on hold also. I've got one by Paul Theroux that is a 21 CD collection! We'll see how that goes.

You can read more about this book here.
(Book 4, 2006)