If you don’t have the time or money to travel overseas, read these 3 travel books.
Travel writing done well has the unique capacity to open up and reawaken thoughts, memories and parts of the subconscious mind that have lain dormant for years (or never been used at all). The best travel stories — as the cliché goes — have a power to whisk you away to new places and entertain you with ideas of escapism, but sometimes they do more than that. Sometimes they can literally change your mind about your own life decisions or make you question closely held assumptions.
In essence, good travel books show us a new dimension of our humanity, whether by introducing the reader to sympathetic foreign characters or revealing insights and discoveries made by protagonists along their journey. Just as the famous Joseph Campbell, in his acclaimed work The Hero With a Thousand Faces, presented the common traits of all hero stories across every culture, the realm of non-fiction travel writing has its own formula for showing how experience ultimately changes the central traveler, and in effect the reader, too.
In my personal reading experience, I’ve noticed three distinct storytelling perspectives used by great travel writers that can each have a profound effect on the reader:
- Observers: Stories that educate and inform you about a foreign and exotic people, culture or way of life. These kinds of stories focus less on the state of mind of the protagonist and more on the subjects he observes, though they are often made better by an acerbic narrator. They engender curiosity and empathy, and sometimes remind us that the world is no fairy tale.
- Sympathizers: These tales put you into the mind of the traveler and show the world through her eyes, providing you with a window into the physical, mental and spiritual effect her travels have on her. They typically involve a character arc or fundamental shift in her outlook. In these stories, we are often reminded of our own personal experiences and sometimes overcome with desire to book a one-way ticket to the farthest flung destination that comes to mind.
- Philosophers: Writing that changes the way we view our own lives by expressing unique wisdom learned through travel. These are the stories, in the vein of Jack Kerouac or Che Guevara, that lay down the groundwork for a life philosophy. They nudge us to think and reevaluate our own place in this world, and they inspire us to spread our wings and grow.
Each in their own individual manner, all three of these perspectives create an emotional connection either to past experiences or future ambitions, which is essentially what keeps us reading. Through this lens, I’ve selected three excellent travel reads, each corresponding to one of these categorical points of view. All of them will challenge you to think.
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts
With the subtitle “an uncommon guide to the art of long-term world travel,” Potts takes aim at common misconceptions of international travel. Perhaps the foremost of these is the idea that traveling the world is more accessible than we are conditioned to believe.
An early section of the book is dedicated to the ease with which anyone can take an extended trip around the globe. The author cites a line from the movie Wall Street, in which the Charlie Sheen protagonist relates his dream of making a million dollars in the stock market so he can quit his job and ride a motorcycle across China. Potts dispels of this “Hollywood silliness” by explaining in step-by-step fashion how the average American can work a menial job for the first six months of the year and save enough money to travel the world for the remaining six months.
Vagabonding isn’t so much a narrative as it is an inspiring self-help gospel. Potts is full of tidbits of simple wisdom, many of which will stick with you for years. One of my personal favorites is the suggestion that a smile is a universal sign of good will everywhere, and you can go further with a willing attitude than with all the language skills on earth.
Another nice benefit of this book is that it’s interspersed with short quotes from famous figures, authors, philosophers and thinkers across history. It puts Potts’ philosophy of traveling in quite a positive light when the likes of Herman Melville and Kurt Vonnegut offer wisdom to back him up.
No matter what the subject, the emphasis of Vagabonding is always on making travel less worrisome, less intimidating and rewarding for all walks of life, whether traveling alone or with a group. For example, Potts champions the idea of packing light and not over-planning. After all, he says, there are very few places left on earth where you cannot buy sunscreen.
Baghdad Without a Map by Tony Horwitz
Baghdad Without a Map is a madcap romp through all corners of the Middle East, told with a mix of humor, insight and cynical wonder by Tony Horwitz, an intrepid writer who spent years combing various nooks and crannies of the world’s most volatile region.
Written during his travels in the 80s, the series of vignettes and sometimes aimless capers take on new significance in light of current events and the ever-deepening modern day entanglements between the opposing cultures of the West and Near East.
After moving to Cairo when his wife picked up a job on a foreign news desk, Horwitz traveled far and wide in 15 countries looking for work, freelance writing and observing local behavior through the eyes of an American foreigner. The results are at times shocking and disturbing, but always entertaining and often illuminating. His exploits include mild hallucinations while chewing khat in Yemen, betting on camel races in Saudi Arabia and shaking hands with lepers at a colony in the Sudan. The deeper he travels into the unknown, the more colorful and borderline ominous his observations become.
Horwitz writes amusing passages of everything from the exotic to the mundane, and it’s in the latter that we often find the most meaningful fodder for ideas on the conflict between truth and stereotype. Mostly, his memoirs double as insightful reporting on social life in remote areas known for their reputation of having guarded attitudes toward the outside world. For this, one cannot help but admire Horwitz for his bravery in treading so far off the reservation.
The result is a memorable, intellectually stimulating book that successfully juxtaposes a mysterious and undeniably seedy world with a heaping portion of humanity.
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler
When Peter Hessler arrived in Fuling, China, with the Peace Corps in 1996, the small village on the Yangtze River hadn’t seen a foreigner since before Mao’s great revolution. But Hessler’s arrival was symbolic of the immense change that was just beginning to take root in countless small towns throughout the Middle Kingdom.
In River Town, Hessler tells the tale of his years teaching English and learning the ins and outs of culture in this small village in Sichuan province. His realizations and insights into the influence on Chinese society of communist party dogma, as well as the lessons taught to him by his students make for some entertaining and thought-provoking storytelling.
During his two years in Fuling, Hessler undergoes a great transformation from bright-eyed, curious outsider to a keen observer and activist, maneuvering around the unbending Chinese authorities and gaining new perspective not just on the locals, but on himself as they see him. He displays a remarkable awareness about the unique moment in history in which he finds himself, perched somewhere between the old China and a future primed to change the people forever.
Above all else, this book gives voice to a marginalized society of interesting characters, discusses the implications of China’s growth from agrarian communist society to first-world economic power, and provides a colorful narrative account of the beauty and challenges of modern China. Hessler takes us through it with more than a touch of grace and wisdom.
Image courtesy of Kevin Poh.