BENGALURU: On my last visit to Paris, I read the restored edition of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. If you want to walk the city streets of Paris in the 1920s and sit in the cafés and bars to catch a glimpse of the literati that famously once made the city their home, reading A Moveable Feast is the best way to time-travel.
Travel books come in styles ranging from the documentary to the literary and the journalistic, and from memoir to humour. Personally, travel memoir is my favourite sub-genre, and everyone should read The Happiness of Pursuit by author, entrepreneur and blogger, Chris Guillebeau. Though the book does not strictly fall under travel memoir, I loved Chris’s message as he set out to visit all the planet’s countries by age 35. His journey’s biggest revelation would be how many people like him exist – each pursuing a challenging quest. These quests are as diverse as humanity itself and the book is a playbook for making your life count!
Travelling helps you to confront new places, new ideas, and new people. It broadens your perspective in unimaginable ways. It allows you to see another culture’s way of life and perspective. It helps you learn more about yourself and grow as a person, both intellectually and emotionally. During the first half of my life, I was fortunate to travel the length and breadth of the country, thanks to my father’s transferable job in the Indian Railways. My professional life allowed me to travel across the world in the second half of my life, some of my favourites being Buenos Aires in Argentina, Jerusalem in Israel, Kyoto in Japan, Death Valley in the USA, Bergen in Norway, and Udaipur in India. A lifetime is not enough to travel to all the places in my bucket list, but the three countries I yearn to visit are Egypt, Iran, and Cuba – not in any particular order!
When it comes to books, my education in this genre was via Bill Bryson and Pico Iyer. All my Bill Bryson books were bought from Premier Bookshop in Bengaluru – I felt that every time Bryson walked out of his door, memorable travel literature threatened to break out. His storytelling laced with humour made the books readable even for people who have never stepped outside their country. Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, A Walk in the Woods, Neither Here nor There, and Down Under. And when it comes to Pico Iyer, I would recommend reading all his books, multiple times – even if you don’t intend to travel to the places he writes about!
Two classics in this genre are Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (2007) and The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux (1975). Eat, Pray, Love launched a thousand solo trips (and a movie starring Julia Roberts) and is no doubt one of the most influential travel books written in the first decade of the 21st century. Gilbert’s tale of leaving her humdrum life to find herself in Italy, India, and Bali will make you want to book a trip and start re-thinking those New Year’s resolutions all at once.
In Theroux’s first travel book, he goes from London to Tokyo – mostly by rail. His main subjects are the passengers he meets. It’s the perfect travel book as I could relate it to my childhood train journeys. There’s a simple idea behind Theroux’s odyssey, but an incredible range of landscapes and people. The book evokes a wonderful sense of freedom that I don’t experience anymore in my travels on an airplane!
A map, a timetable and the Lonely Planet used to be necessary travel aids in the past. Today, all we need is a phone with an internet connection, but a good travel memoir remains a timeless companion!
(The writers’ views are their own)
VR Ferose
(The author is a technologist based in Silicon Valley who is gently mad about books)