Travels in the Riel World

I just finished reading a book called “Four Seasons in Rome,” by Anthony Doerr. One the surface, it’s the tale of a husband and wife who move to Rome for a year (for a writing fellowship) with their two children. The catch is that the children are twins and are only a few months old when the sojourn in Rome begins, so the story is really about learning to navigate Rome while also learning how to be a parent to two young boys.

The story is fun to read and has the added benefit of wonderful prose and interesting insights into Italian life. A sample of Doerr’s writing about Rome:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

And an observation about Italians:

“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

I’m always amazed when writers catch my eye with just the poetic power of their prose, and I love to discover random nuggets of cultural insight buried in manuscripts about other topics. On both of these counts, “Four Seasons in Rome” was a good read.

In 1975, Paul Theroux published a bestselling travel memoir, The Great Railway Bazaar, about a train trip from Europe to Asia. In the years since he has become one of the world’s most successful and best known travel writers. He recently published a new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in which he retraces much of his first route to Asia by train. He spoke with USA Today about the trip and his writing.

The most striking change you saw?
Without question, Vietnam. From a country that was a muddy, flattened, bloody, beleaguered hell hole … to the country it is today: flourishing, forward-looking and, almost incredibly, forgiving.

How tempted were you to try to retrace your 1973 route through Afghanistan?
After I read about the numerous abductions and killings of Western wanderers like myself in Afghanistan, it was an easy decision to detour through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — some great train rides in those countries. And lately they have been in the news, so I think I was lucky in my timing.

Do you agree with The Guardian’s description of you as “the Indiana Jones of American literature”?
Very nice. I’m flattered. But I have only been shot at three times: twice in Africa, once in the Philippines. I have been bitten by snakes, and once by bats in an outhouse one night in Central Africa. I think Indy can top those.

Any advice to travelers?
If you’re planning to write something about your travels, go alone, go overland, go cheap, and leave all electronics behind. To all travelers, I urge patience.

The website New West has an interview online with Heather Hansen, co-author of the new book, Disappearing Destinations, which looks at the environmental challenges that are plaguing popular tourist destinations worldwide. An excerpt from the interview:

How did you come up with the idea for Disappearing Destinations?

Kim and I were at a conference in Denver, talking about the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which had just come out. We tossed around the idea of “1,000 Places to See Before THEY Die.” Once we started looking at our favorite places in that context, we became obsessed with writing a book that could help travelers see their dream destinations as whole places with real issues that affect the lives of the people who live there and, ultimately, the viability of the locations themselves.

Global warming seems to be the cause of many of the problems you describe … Do you think it’s more difficult for local people to respond to the situation when the cause is so widespread?

In the case of climate change in this region, there’s plenty that people can do on a daily basis to mitigate its effects…It may be difficult to see immediate results but that doesn’t mean we aren’t making a marked difference at a critical time. As Gerald Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder says in the book: “The longer we wait, the worse the problem gets. Every day we’re committing ourselves to climate change in the future. When you view it that way, it’s not something that you should just give up on…

Since our expertise is in how to travel more mindfully our message is also that all us have control over the way we move around the world. We have the power to affect change–for worse, or we hope better–in these places with the choices we make. For example, if you go to the Galápagos, you have the choice whether or not to support an outfitter with a proven record of environmental stewardship and investment in the local community.

What do you suggest that people who are concerned about the issues you raise in your book do?

What needs to be done really varies from one location to the next. In some places, responsible tourism is the “great green hope” as I talk about in the Appalachia chapter. Just going there and contributing to the diversification of the economy makes a difference (this is also the case in the Congo Basin and the Amazon where tourism revenue can sustain a population in the long term, while logging cannot).

A few weeks ago, I saw an article in the NY Times about the exploding popularity of “cellphone novels” in Japan.

Until recently, cellphone novels — composed on phone keypads by young women wielding dexterous thumbs and read by fans on their tiny screens — had been dismissed in Japan as a subgenre unworthy of the country that gave the world its first novel, “The Tale of Genji,” a millennium ago. Then last month, the year-end best-seller tally showed that cellphone novels, republished in book form, have not only infiltrated the mainstream but have come to dominate it.

Of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels. What is more, the top three spots were occupied by first-time cellphone novelists.

An interesting phenomenon, to be sure, but as I filed the thought away I couldn’t decide what, if anything, it said about Japanese culture. Now, though, thanks to a post on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, I was led to an interesting description of the cell phone novel from the perspective of Japanese communication styles.

Is this the future of literature? In Japanese, maybe. There are a number of features of Japan’s language and culture that make a cell phone novel more palatable than it would be in English. First, Japanese grammar is much better suited than English to the kind of short sentences writing on a cell phone encourages.

As a high-context language, a complete sentence in Japanese can consist of just a single, lonely verb. Japanese speakers and writers frequently and freely omit subjects and objects from their sentences, expecting the reader to figure out what’s going on. Go figure. The use of Chinese characters also serves to compact sentences. Since you don’t have to actually spell out entire words, as in English, but can represent them with an ideogram, you can say a lot more in a much smaller space.

Secondly, and perhaps just as important, cell phone novels tap into long traditions of Japanese prose and poetry. First, even a cursory examination of a cell phone novel will show a visual connection to the poetic traditions of haiku and tanka. The connection doesn’t end there, at its best the writing itself has an economy and - I’ll regret saying this - poetry that taps into the same tradition. The medium - you try typing a novel on the keypad of a cell phone - forces the writers to make every word count, and (in Japanese at least) it shows.

The themes, as well, harken back to traditional Japanese themes. The first “modern” novel (written by Murasaki Shikibu in 11th century Japan), The Tale of Genji, was basically a high school love story, and nothing has changed since then…And the long, long literary tradition there, combined with the frequent use of public transportation, means that books in general, whether written on cell phones or not, occupy a much more important place in Japanese culture than in the West.

If you’re interested in learning more about high-context langauge and other such forms of communication, by the way, you can check out some of the writings of Edward Hall, such as The Silent Language.

If you like to read, then you likely have a favorite local bookstore or two. But what about when you travel? As Beth Harpaz of the Associated Press asked in a recent article, “When is a bookstore worth a tourist’s time?” She went on to profile nine U.S. bookstores that were “worth traveling for.” It’s a nice companion story to a similar piece in the U.K. Guardian, which went further geographically and recommended 10 favorite bookstores around the world.

Some selections from the international list:

* Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen (Maastricht, Netherlands). What does a city do with an 800-year-old church with no congregation? Well, it could make like the Dutch and convert it into a temple of books. The old Dominican church in Maastricht … has been turned into what could possibly be the most beautiful bookshop of all time.

* El Ateneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina). All the world’s a page at El Ateneo, a bookshop converted from an old theatre in downtown Buenos Aires … with high painted ceiling, original balconies and ornate carvings intact. Even the crimson stage curtains remain part of the show. Comfy chairs are scattered throughout, the stage is utilised as a reading area and café, and even better, the former theatre boxes are used as tiny reading rooms.

And from the U.S. recommendations:

* City Lights Books (San Francisco).  This store, a city landmark, was co-founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti … The store continues to serve as a center for counterculture activities and politics … Tourists also like to stop in at the bar next door, Vesuvio, to have a drink where Kerouac once bellied up.

* Tattered Cover Book Store (Denver).  Visitors to Denver often go to 16th Street, a mile-long outdoor mall through the heart of LoDo, historic Lower Denver. There, amid breweries and boutiques, near the arenas where Denver’s major league teams play and across from the train station, you’ll find the Tattered Cover. “We get a whole lot of tourists, along with people waiting for trains and fans hanging out until game time,” said spokeswoman Patty Miller … The LoDo location is especially inviting, with cozy nooks, overstuffed chairs and a gas fireplace.

2007 has been a big year. I recently wrote about the birth of my first child. Now, I’m here with news about a different type of birth - that of my first book.

Two Laps Around the World: Tales and Insights from a Life Sabbatical is now on the market. The book is about the experiences that my wife and I had when we decided to take a few months off from our careers to travel. The experience was so incredible that we repeated the experience less than three years later and so ended up traveling around the world twice - once in each direction.

You can read more about the book here. There are excerpts from a few chapters, a reading guide for book clubs, and information about how to buy an autographed copy. The book is also available online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope you’ll check it out! And when you do, please let me know what you think.

I saw a unique story in yesterday’s newspaper about a library service in rural Kenya that delivers books by camel.

And you thought the bookmobile was rustic. Try having your books delivered by camel, then reading them under the shade of the acacia tree.

For 11 years, eager readers in Kenya’s isolated North Eastern Province have been doing just that, thanks to the Camel Library Service. Begun with three camels, the library, which operates close to the Somali border in Garissa, now has a dozen camels traveling to four settlements a day, four days a week, hauling the world of books to a semi-nomadic people.

After the books are spread out on grass mats under the shade, readers choose their books, which are written in either English or Swahili, the two official languages of Kenya.

This topic so intrigued author Masha Hamilton, in fact, that she wrote a novel about it - titled, appropriately enough, The Camel Bookmobile.

Argentines love to read and to drink coffee. So the annual Buenos Aires International Book Fair, which runs late into the night and draws more than one million visitors during its two-week schedule, is a popular event with most Argentines. Here is a description from a recent Washington Post article:

For all those who love to read, who enjoy getting lost in crowds, who are intrigued by the idea of a powerful espresso after midnight, who loathe being rushed, who get mildly depressed when reading yet another article prophesizing a straight-to-hell future for the printed word — this is the time and the place for you…

Unlike some international book fairs, this one does not cater to publishing industry types. It caters to readers. These readers happen to live in one of the world’s great nocturnal cities, where cafes do brisk business until dawn on streets named for writers — Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Hernandez, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and so on.

Seven minutes after midnight, the entrance to the exposition looks like an amusement park at noon on a Saturday. Chorizos, spicy sausages, and hamburgers sizzle on sidewalk grills, clowns hand out programs. Drum music pulses from a band of unseen street musicians caught somewhere between the thousands of readers leaving the fair and the thousands just arriving.

The publishing industry is shrinking in many countries, but not Argentina. Since an economic collapse in 2001, the number of new titles published annually here has more than doubled. Argentines are, for the most part, proud of their country’s reputation as a literary capital in South America…

It is on nights like this when the fair is at its most quintessentially Argentine, when the national passions for reading and for the night feed into one another, when more than 35,000 pass through the entry gates after 9 p.m., most lingering until the red-eyed hours.

First came the book, 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. Then the Travel Channel decided to base a television series around the concept and selected a Denver couple, Albin and Melanie Ulle, to embark “on a 14-week excursion across 13 countries.” The Ulle’s experiences were filmed for the series, which premieres March 29, according to this story.

The Ulles came back changed by the experience:

When Albin and Melanie Ulle are asked about their favorite places … they talk less about the destinations than the people they met:

• The maitre d’ in France who proudly wore an American flag on his lapel.
• The Bhutan citizens who measure “gross national happiness” rather than the gross national product.
• And a poor black South African woman who single-handedly put four girls through private school during apartheid and later ran for mayor of her township.

Even some of the small lessons affected the way the couple now looks at things:

“There are all these little things that have changed for us,” Melanie says, noting one. “I notice that I don’t want to (do) drive-through coffee anymore. I enjoy drinking coffee, and people all over the world treat it as a ritual. I know its so minor, so dumb, but that means something.”

Albin adds: “We’re so rushed a lot of the time, and I think we all kind of know that, but to see people actually slow down, sit and talk and laugh. Good things can come from slowing down sometimes.”

The story notes that experiences such as these are part of a growing trend for people to take sabbaticals to travel or have other life experiences. And if you follow my blog, you know I’m a believer in that.

Thomas Friedman, in his 2005 book of the same name, coined the now well-known phrase, “The world is flat,” which he described as meaning that “the playing field is being flattened.”  As he wrote:

It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.

Now, a new report is suggesting that Friedman is only partially correct.  Taking nothing away from the insight that the playing field is more flat, the report claims that “the globe actually is ’spiked’ – that is, studded with regional hot spots that tower above a mostly flat landscape.”

While Friedman’s flat world suggests that innovation can happen just about anywhere, it may be that regional spikes and their behaviors are the more critical factor. A map of the spiked world, for example, shows unmistakable clustering of venture capital, IT employment and patents – key indicators of innovation activity.

In the United States, those clusters occur most obviously in Silicon Valley, but also in Boston, and secondarily in Seattle, Austin and Raleigh. Globally, as the Index of Silicon Valley shows, such clusters occur in Israel, India, Beijing, Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, Taiwan and Tokyo, and at a handful of locations in Europe.

You can read more and can download the entire 2007 Index of Silicon Valley report here.

It is one of our great challenges, particularly for Americans with little vacation time — creating time in our lives to travel.  Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding, has a variety of ideas for individuals who are determined to hit the road.

Short of simply asking for more vacation time, many people negotiate long-term leaves of absence or sabbaticals (paid or unpaid, depending upon the situation) to enable travel.  Others fine-tune their careers so that they are doing seasonal or contract work, which frees them up to travel between work engagements.  Still others will quit a job and then work a long-term travel stint into their life before accepting a new job.

With the advent of new communication technologies it has also become possible to adopt what has been called a “global mobility lifestyle” - which allows you to redesign your work life in such a way that it can mix in with extended travel.

He focused on the latter possibility in a recent interview he conducted with Tim Ferriss, author of the upcoming book, The 4-Hour Workweek.  Some highlights:

What are the biggest misconceptions people have about work, and making time for travel?

The biggest misconception about work is that you have to spend most of your life doing it. 

I’ve spent the last four years traveling through more than 25 countries interviewing people who have automated income or escaped the office, often without quitting their jobs.  Some of them negotiate “working from the home office” while actually trekking in Africa or touring in Europe, satellite phones and Quad-band Treos in hand. Others create simple virtual businesses that enable them to quit the grind and take one-to-three-month “mini-retirements” a few times per year…

Once you control the most valuable currencies in the digital age - mobility and time - $40,000 can get you more luxury lifestyle than a $500,000 per year investment banker who can’t escape the office.

Many people often can’t stop thinking about work minutiae, even when they’re far away from the traditional office setting.  How do you get your mind, and not just your body, out of the office?

In the experience of those I’ve interviewed, it takes two to three months just to unplug from work routines and become aware of how much we distract ourselves with constant motion.  Can you have a two-hour dinner with Spanish friends without getting anxious?  Can you get accustomed to a small town where all businesses take a siesta for two hours in the afternoon? If not, you need to ask: why?

Learn to slow down.  If you create a mobile lifestyle, whether through a remote work arrangement or entrepreneurship, escaping the “too-weak vacation” world is as simple as using a few common technologies and believing it can be done.

Not many people see Afghanistan as a tourist destination these days, although a few decades ago it was a popular stop on the backpacker trail that went overland from North Africa across the Middle East to India.  Despite Afghanistan’s fall from the tourist map, however, there are still travelers heading to the country. 

As Joshua Hammer reports in the Sunday NY Times, Afghanistan is an interesting destination and the capital city of Kabul is actually pretty safe compared to the rest of the country.  Some excerpts from the article:

In the 1970s, tens of thousands of visitors poured into Kabul each year, when the Afghan capital rivaled Kathmandu as the favored Central Asian haunt for young backpackers… Then came the Russians, then the Taliban, and then the bombings following 9/11, pretty much destroying Kabul’s reputation as a favored stop on the Hippie Trail. Now, however, even though much of Afghanistan remains dangerous, tourists are beginning to trickle back in…

Most tourists who pass through view Kabul as an overnight stopover on the way to more remote corners of the country: the rugged Pamir Mountains in the northeast; the exotic bazaar town of Mazar-i-Sharif; and Bamiyan, the former site of the giant stone Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban. But those who linger for a few days, as I did, will discover a vibrant capital, steeped in tumultuous history and rich with Silk Road atmospherics…

In a week of exploring the city, from the windswept, near-deserted ramparts to the teeming, labyrinthine passageways of the Mandayi Bazaar, I never once felt threatened. To the contrary, I was welcomed everywhere by Afghans eager to show me that their country and city were groping their way toward recovery.

If you’re interested in reading more about contemporary Afghanistan, you should pick up a copy of The Places in Between by Rory Stewart.  It’s a tale of the author’s walk across Afghanistan and was named one of the ten best books of 2006, an unusual compliment for a travel narrative.

There was a wonderful in-depth interview recently on World Hum with the travel writer Pico Iyer.  He is the author of Video Night in Kathmandu, Falling Off the Map, and a number of other titles.  Some excerts from the interview:

How do you think travel writing has evolved over the past 20 or 30 years?

I think it’s evolved a great deal. Partly because even when I was growing up, travel writing was mostly white, nearly always male, often from England, and about going to Africa and Kenya and surveying the strange customs of the natives. And I think now it is more and more about a half-Thai, half-German girl living in Iowa City, going to an Afghanistan full of German aid workers and Japanese businessmen.

And what used to be a very simple discussion between, in some ways, colonizer and colonized, is now a dialogue between a multi-cultural society and a multi-cultural person. All of which has made the texts much more interesting.

I think travel writing is also having to confront a challenge, which is a good challenge, namely the fact that it is not a remarkable thing now to describe Mongolia or Tibet because anyone can access them on the Internet or their TV screens. And so the person who goes there has to do something more and other than just bringing back the sights and sounds. … the travel writer has to extend the form and refresh it, to write a more inward kind of travel.

You are very adept at noticing trends, global trends, not only in cultures and how they’re exchanged, but also in people, and how they travel. Have you noticed anything in terms of after 9/11 versus pre- 9/11 about how that changed?

In the rest of the world, I don’t see much of a change in perceptions of America except perhaps a hardening of that fundamental disjunction … which is that most parts of the world are quite skeptical or hostile towards the American government, but those same people love American culture and love nearly every American individual they meet.

A few years ago I went around to all the countries then covered by the “Trading With the Enemies Act” - Cuba, China, North Korea, and Vietnam - and I found … those people were more keen to meet Americans than anyone else.  And that’s something … that many people in this country who don’t travel, don’t know.

I suppose the only thing I notice is that the gap between America and the rest of the world does seem to be increasing. … The country that most wants to change the world is also the country that least wants to see or learn about the world.

Did you know that the number one lost-and-found item on Eurostar trains between Paris and London is copies of the book The Da Vinci Code?  They are apparently left by the increasing numbers of people who are on Da Vinci Code quests in two of the main cities featured in Dan Brown’s novel.

That’s just one clue to the remarkable tourism boom caused by Brown’s book.  Business Week calls it “a cultural event that’s rapidly becoming an economic phenomenon.”  This involves not just books, merchandise and a major Hollywood movie, but also considerable jumps in tourist visits to France, England and Scotland, and to such sites as the Louvre in Paris and Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.  This isn’t the first time, of course, that a movie has generated interest in travel to a particular place, as Gadling and Travel & Leisure have recently pointed out, but The Da Vinci Code seems to be in a class of its own.

In the Washington Post, meanwhile, Jefferson Morley has a roundup of world opinion about The Da Vinci Code, from England to India, Argentina to South Africa.  He quotes a British writer as saying that the story ”has clearly touched something in the popular psyche.”

I was intrigued by a recent story in the NY Times about literature that inspires people to travel.  The newspaper polled authors for titles that have aroused their wanderlust.  It got me to thinking about books I’ve read that fit into that category.  Not travel narratives, for they are meant to invoke dreams of the road, but other literature that makes one want to visit a particular place.  Below are three of my nominations.  What would your choices be?

On the Road.  Jack Kerouac’s ode to the American road trip…

Then came spring, the time of great traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. … Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night. 

The Lover.  Marguerite Duras’ book about a young girl and her lover in colonial Indochina.  She writes about Saigon…

It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night.  And night is beginning now, with the setting sun. … Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, incense, charcoal fires. 

A Moveable Feast.  Ernest Hemingway and Paris…

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Ah, the enchantment of the American road.  Rolf Potts uses his Yahoo travel column this week to interview Jamie Jensen, author of Road Trip USA.  Jensen discusses the attraction of this uniquely American journey:

In Europe, you have towns and cities where people walk around; in America, we drive. It’s the difference between the passegiata (the evening promenade you see in Italy), and the weekend car cruises of American Graffiti, listening to Chuck Berry sing “Driving around in my automobile…”

It’s hard to imagine America without cars, and people who come here from other countries want to have the quintessential American experience.  They don’t want to see ancient ruins or monuments or works of art; they want to drive around for days and weeks on end, doing that Jack Kerouac On the Road thing. 

“It’s my duty to give my children an interesting childhood.”

So says Tahir Shah, a British writer who moved his wife and two children to Morocco, renovated a 10-bedroom mansion, began a new life, and then wrote a book (The Caliph’s House) about the whole experience.  The New York Times profiled Shah and his new home.

Home is now Dar Khalifa, a walled villa whose rooftop terraces offer not only a cinematic view of the Atlantic Ocean but also the dispiriting sprawl of tin-roofed shacks and fly-blown garbage heaps that is the standard-issue landscape of Morocco’s slums. This dramatically different new life is the alternately comical and alarming subject of Mr. Shah’s 10th book, The Caliph’s House: A Year in Casablanca, published by Bantam in February.