Perceptive Travel

Perceptive Travel Book Reviews June 2017
by Susan Griffith

In this issue: accounts of roaming the world alone, a solo backpacking trip around South America, and tales from an older wiser writer who captures beautifully the pleasures of roaming around Britain on foot.

Roam Alone: Inspiring Tales by Reluctant Solo Travellers
Compiled by Jennifer Barclay and Hilary Bradt

Since 1974, Bradt Travel Guides have been publishing admirably detailed guide books to obscure destinations from Albania to Zambia. Recently they have ventured into the field of travel literature. This anthology is the result of a competition the publishers ran last year, inviting submissions of only 1,000-2,000 words from reluctant solo travelers recounting "exciting, amusing and even nerve-racking experiences... culminating in a happy ending". Almost all the contributions follow this narrative trajectory: fear and anxiety at the prospect of traveling alone are faced down; the first shaky steps abroad (lots of thudding hearts, churning stomachs, prickling skin) are taken to overcome cowardice and homesickness; finally feelings of exhilaration follow and usually a lifelong addiction to solo travel. 

These little essays and reminiscences may well inspire nervous nellies, but I can't say they all spoke to me. The majority are by women (33 out of 40) and I felt a little impatient with all the jittery nerves and admissions of hopelessness with maps. Several contributors are traumatized at the prospect of boarding a plane or walking the length of a train on their own. A woman on a mass sponsored cycling ride is too crippled by nerves to enter a pub despite the scores of bicycles parked outside. An honest Russian taxi driver is assumed to be a terrorist and kidnapper. Irrational suspicion stalks the land (reminding me of a friend who is enslaved by what she calls her WCS genes, referring to Worst Case Scenario). If you are robust and optimistic of outlook, you may find all this a bit alien and disheartening.

Inevitably a volume compiled in this way will be uneven in the quality of writing. Keen disappointment in a wintry visit to Vienna is summarized pithily in "the youth hostel was empty, the Danube wasn't blue and my suede desert boots leaked." In other cases the prose is baggy and pedestrian, and suffers when compared (perhaps unfairly) to the last anthology I reviewed in these pages featuring short pieces by literary luminaries. The contributors to Roam Alone are everyday likeable people of all ages, whose tales may well embolden others to set aside their doubts and set off to have their senses sharpened and experiences heightened by traveling alone.

Miss Adventures: A Tale of Ignoring Life Advice While Backpacking Around South America
By Amy Baker

Now we turn to a 30-something woman who professes to be undaunted at the prospect of traveling alone. The book starts promisingly with her gutsy resistance to naysayers at home who predict catastrophe if she follows through with her intention of giving up her job in London and going on an extended solo trip to South America. But her claims of independence begin to ring false when she seems to rely on friends and acquaintances to organize her and rarely ventures outside the community of travelers. When the others on her organized trip into the Amazon rainforest of Bolivia are preparing to have a swim in the river, she thinks in cartoon terms of "crocodiles, piranhas and those fish that swim up your urethra." But her timidity is overcome when she remembers that joining in will enable her to "strut her funky stuff" in her new pineapple-adorned bikini.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I read on page 259, that "[all my] mistakes and poor interactions with all kinds of good and bad humans finally confirmed what I already suspected to be true, and what I'd been slowly figuring out traveling alone - that I needed to focus on myself, what I think, and what makes me happy." Yet she has spent most of the book dissecting her own feelings and behavior, primarily why she seems to snag/shag the wrong men. Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru and Argentina form an incidental backdrop.

She is long past adolescence and yet often behaves in a juvenile and boy-crazy manner. A strange combination of self-critical awareness and a failure to grow up recurs throughout. Here she is on a hike up Huayna Potosí in Bolivia: "I huffed and puffed every step of the way, and I moaned to my teammates that I was 'bored of walking', as though I'd genuinely believed we'd be riding state-of-the-art mountain segways the whole way. I insisted on breathing breaks every 100 steps, and only perked up briefly when bribed with chocolate. I had successfully regressed to my 13-year-old self." Joining a yoga retreat with some insufferably smug and humorless clean-living yoga-buffs from the USA provides material for lampooning, and indeed the description of the sharing-your-feelings session is pretty amusing. Yet (fatally for a humorist), she is left feeling inferior to these people, not least because she envies them their toned bodies and healthy skin.

The depiction of contemporary backpacking is a depressing one. Decisions are taken when drunk or with a hangover, and soon regretted. In the chapter called "The Night of the Supersonic Weed Brownies" we hear in excruciating detail about the horrible side effects of overdoing the drugs. Her pursuit of these recreations naturally results in scrapes, as in the chapter called "An Unfortunate Run-in with Colombian Drug Barons". No doubt there are readers who will be gripped and entertained, especially if they share the author's belief that the height of traveling is sharing nightly beers with fellow backpackers and improving your tan "which we all know is a huge priority when returning from anywhere."

The January Man: A Year of Walking Britain
By Christopher Somerville

Turning back to my comfort zone, we now consider a book by a superlative writer born in 1949 rather than 1984. The author's gaze is on the world around him, especially its natural history, rather than on himself. His skill at describing just what he sees is remarkable. Even an ordinary duck on the Lancashire Marshes comes vividly before us: "On a fleet of water sails a male shoveler, a handsome drake with iridescent dark green head and chestnut flanks, a hefty blade of a beak and an eye like a drop of liquid gold. It is a peacocking get-up, designed by a cruel committee specially to show up the drabness of his mate." He has a gift for anthropomorphizing, which he considers a weakness, but which bring charm and animation. In a Norfolk bird reserve he picks out the individual voices of a flock of pink-footed geese: "a squeaky soprano complaining, a hoarse basso profundo suggesting a goose with a chesty cold, the quavering falsetto hoot of a girl laughing her head off..." and so on. He even anthropomorphizes his favorite pub which is like an old acquaintance who would "be the one that you rely on to tell you the unvarnished truth."

The book is structured around the calendar year and around one of the author's favorite folk songs from which he takes the title. Each of the 15 walking destinations were chosen to suit a particular time of year. The well-documented long-distance footpaths of Britain don't interest the author who prefers to "unmask the nebulous" routes. He encounters some cracking stories from the past along the way, like the 19th century vicar trapped in a devastating blizzard after walking miles to conduct a service in the remote Shropshire village of Ratlinghope, and the man who sold his wife at Hampshire's Weyhill Fair in 1832.

There are personal stories too, since the ghost of the author's father inhabits the text. The choices of destination often relate to walking trips Somerville has done with his father, which helped them to develop a relationship later in life. This is a very British account of a father-son relationship and more moving for its restraint and light touch.

You have to admire prose that is disciplined and precise like this. Just after reading it and while on a Sunday ramble, I actually identified from his exact description a tortoiseshell butterfly. Whether or not those not yet initiated into the joys of hiking in the British Isles are inspired or repelled (by the rain, mud and wind), they will enjoy the beauty and wisdom contained in this book.

Susan Griffith is a Canadian travel writer and editor based in Cambridge England, who writes books and articles for adventurous working travelers. Starting with the classic Work Your Way Around the World and Teaching English Abroad, she has also turned her attention to gap years and has written definitive guides for the young and the not-so-young: Your Gap Year and Gap Years for Grown-ups. She also contributes to the travel pages of the Independent, an online British daily newspaper.

See the last round of book reviews from Susan Griffith.