Month: June 2013

Travel books have a wide appeal, to actual travelers, potential travelers and simple armchair explorers.

• ŸWe looked at The Daily Telegraph ‘s list of twenty best travel books. I mentioned The Happy Traveller (1923) by the Reverend Frank Tatchell, because it’s brilliant and deserves your attention.
• ŸFrommers took us on  car journeys in France.
• ŸFor younger, poorer travelers, we recommended  Lonely Planet’s Europe on a Shoestring,
• ŸZagat’s guides are the go-to source for restaurants – we thought we’d dine in Paris with them.
• ŸFor adventure on a budget, we went with the many guides from Lonely Planet, looking at Nepal  and Botswana.
• ŸFor adventure at premium prices,  we looked at Fodor’s The Complete African Safari Planner   
• The Book Haven has a great review of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods.
• ŸDavid Miller’s  AWOL on the Applachian Trail covered the same ground, but less incompetently than the hapless Bryson and Katz team.
• ŸFor classic travel tales we looked at Eric Newby’s  A Short walk in the Hindu Kush and Mark Twain’s Following the Equator.

Pack your bags… and head for your armchair!

There are so many classic travel books, and recommending a single one is hard. So I’ll go to yet another list of great travel books – remember the Daily Telegraph list we saw –  let’s go to that for Eric Newby’s  A Short walk in the Hindu Kush.

” — but readers of the much-loved book are recompensed with a hilarious segment that recounts a mountain-side encounter with the adventurer Wilfred Thesiger: “We started to blow up our air-beds. ‘God, you must be a couple of pansies,’ said Thesiger.”

Want an audiobook? How about Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, about his Pacific journey. Twain told us the travel is fatal to prejudice, and here we get some of his wry reflections on the world.

Bill Bryson is the funniest writer working today. That’s my opinion. He has traveled widely, lived in Britain and the US, and written about science, language and, of course, travel.

My extra- special favorite Bryson book is “A Walk in the Woods”, the tale of an overweight middle-aged man (being Bryson) and his even more out of shape childhood friend Stephen Katz, as they kike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.

But don’t trust me. The Book Haven has a great review of it. Buy it where you buy good books. For an audiobook of the same journey by someone else entirely, listen to David Miller’s  AWOL on the Applachian Trail.

We all love adventures. Some of us want to go on them. Some of us recall adventures we’ve been on with pleasure or “What was I thinking?”  – I say this as a suburban officer-dweller who helped move a bus stuck in a streambed in the Andes, 16,000 feet above sea level. Some of us simply want to read about other people’s adventures.

Guides to adventure travel come in two varieties . There are the backpacker, Nepal-on-a-budget guides that are strong on youth hostels, environmentalism and places to eat for an American dollar. Lonely Planet is very strong in this area. Here’s that book on Nepal. But you can also go to Bolivia, or Sri Lanka, or Botswana.

For those of us who aren’t twenty two anymore, and are happy to trade a bit more money – okay a  lot more money – you can do the eco-tourist thing in the world’s rainforests, or play Ernest Hemingway and go on a safari. These days safaris are almost all photography-based. You have to be very rich to go and shoot wildlife, and people will think poorly of you, and deride your manhood. Try Fodor’s The Complete African Safari Planner. This is from Amazon.

One of the main reasons to travel is to eat. If you ask me about the time I visited the amazing rebuilt medieval city of Carcassonne, destroyed by a French crusades against the Cathar heretics in the early thirteenth century, I will tell you about the Vietnamese restaurant where I could not – not – get the waiter to bring the check. I can tell you about why you should not eat the sausage sandwich at a particular British motorway cafe (because it’s disgusting) and why you should not eat the cuy in the Andes (because guinea pigs are cute).

The Travel Channel features almost no shows about travel that aren’t really about eating.

Your standard guidebook will suggest some places to eat, along with where to stay and what to see. But if you are going to a big city, that list of six restaurants (two cheap, two medium-priced, two expensive) isn’t enough. You need a real foodie guide. Try Zagat, whose restaurant guides also feature maps, city info and reviews from recent diners.

I could give you Zagat’s guide to new Jersey, but let’s go to Paris instead. The driving is about the same, but the food is better.

No, I don’t know where to eat in Ouaggadougou. I have never vacationed in Burkina Faso.

We’ve all seen them, and many of us have bought them – those chubby volumes designed to cram lots and lots of information in small print (with tiny maps) that tell us all we’ll need to know about wherever we’re going. Some are aimed at a high-end traveller, with lots of swish hotels and five star restaurants. Some are more budget conscious.

In the 1950s,  Arthur Frommer began publishing guidebooks for American GIs returning to Europe to visit the battlefields where they fought during WWII. He became the go-to  travel authority for his generation and for the baby boomers that followed in his footsteps.  Frommer’s remains a leading name among travel guides. Let’s go for some great car journeys in France, shall we? The other biggie in this group of guides are Fodor’s.

Travelers who want the best can look at HIP Hotels or Nota Bene, of which it has been written:

“If your choice of hotel depends on which one offers the highest thread-count in its Egyptian-cotton sheets, Nota Bene is for you.”

For those who won’t be tipping any valets of maitre ‘ds,  you can go to Rough Guide or Let’s Go. The Lonely Planet series covers the world. For a taster, look at Europe on a Shoestring, which covers 45 countries alphabetically from Albania to Ukraine. Although, of course, you are going to Amsterdam, like everyone else who bought the book.

Some of my favorite books are travel books. Last month I borrowed a guide to Iceland, and looked especially at the remote northern region known as the Westfjords. Now, I’ve never been to Iceland, have no immediate plans to do so, and frankly my partner in all things indicates that I am a lunatic for even thinking about it. But now I now where to find the best place to eat locally caught fish – and, oh look! A pizza joint!

Travel books generally consist of guide books – where to go, where to stay, what and where to eat – and what are sometimes called ‘travel memoirs’, which at minimum consist of “Where I went, stayed and ate”. The best of these are far more interesting than that, of course.

The Daily Telegraph of London did a list of twenty best travel books, from Kerouac’s On the Road through George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia to Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia. Pick any of these and you won’t go wrong. My own choice of these –  the strangely Victorian explorer-out-of-his-time Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands details five years wandering among the Bedouin of the desert known as The Empty Quarter.

Lastly I’ll mention my favorite travel book, the hard to find  The Happy Traveller (1923) by the Reverend Frank Tatchell, an eccentric English clergyman who – paying for a curate to cover his duties – spent much time travelling alone, often in disguise as a tramp. If you want advice as to what to do if attacked by wild dogs or middle eastern mobs, this is the place to start!