Great writers telling great travel stories about the world
I’ve always loved to travel. I know that getting to see other cultures and to learn to respect all the varied ways that humans live is crucial - I would even say essential - to building empathy and to refute the always-creeping tendency we have to distrust or even dislike others.
Even the idea of travel, without the hassles, is important for a life lived well. Which is why I’ve been enjoying the 34 tales in The Lonely Planet Travel Antholog: True Stories from the World’s Best Writers from 2016. As an added bonus, the anthology appears to be an excellent entree into discovering authors who really know how to tell a compelling story and have plenty of other writings worth checking out.
Here are some interesting nuggets from the authors of the book’s first six stories about their travels around the world:
While approaching Uluru on a high-school trip, the geological anomaly in the 70% arid-to-desert Australia was awe-inspiring. It takes so long to approach it that nobody cared about it anymore by the time of arrival, drenched in flies, storms, and heat. - Torre DeRoche, whose debut Love with a Chance of Drowning looks like a worthwhile mix of fiction and travel memoir that I’m adding to my “to read” list.
After her mom tells her not to dare leave the Bangkok airport on her eight-hour layover, the author disregards that warning and heads in a cab to a bustling market. While barely able to communicate with the cabbie, she leaves her luggage with him and they agree to a meetup spot for him to take her back to the airport. A bit of a frazzling, harrowing afternoon ensues, “but maybe Bangkok hadn’t beaten me after all … this vast, unrelenting, irreverent, unnerving, stifling city had revealed a lifelong truth about travel” in the form of taking a leap of faith and truly building memories. I felt the same way about the place. - Blane Bachelor, who has gone on to be a prominent travel writer at newspapers and magazines. I wish she had a book because this is an entertaining essay, but she has more essays to offer here.
Floating through the Arctic sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime-type experience, but I don’t get any vibes on what the place may be like in this poetic (but not at all descriptive) piece of so-called travel writing. - Rebecca Dinerstein
Staring out at the Mississippi River somewhere in Wisconsin, the author was visiting the U.S. for the first time and taking in its imagery. Simple and short and probably a pretty universal feeling that newcomers get. - Jan Morris
Despite being from California, the author writes all her novels set in Great Britain. This is influenced by a school trip she took there in her teens in the 1960s. The Beatles ruled and it was Swinging London. The buildings were not clean like they are now because they hadn’t started spray washing them regularly and plus, London “Town” was still recovering in many sections from World War II. As she gets older, she would go back to the country again and again, viewing it from every angle - from the top of the red double-decker buses to the bottom of the Underground subway. “In 1966 [on her first trip], England grabbed my heart and gobbled up my soul.” - Elizabeth George, who has written a ton of books about a character named Inspector Lynley.
When the author was a student at Edinburgh University in Scotland in 1987, one of the professors would sometimes have a well-known folk singer, Belle Stewart, known in those pre-PC times as a gypsy, visit the class. The author loved this singer and boldly headed to the singer’s hometown some 60 miles north to knock on her door. The author leaves shortly thereafter, embarrassed at her star-gazing, then branches to another tale about a night spent in a hostel with a handsome Danish man. In these small stories she realizes that these experiences are worthy of telling in some way as she continues shaping herself as a writer. - Jane Hamilton, most known for her 2014 novel The Book of Ruth, about a woman trying to navigate through her place in a dysfunctional family.
By far my favorites here are the first two essays - about Australia and Thailand.