Travel solo, but take a book

Few days back I found myself walking again under –this time – the lighter weight of a familiar load: my blue backpack. Slightly absent minded yet ready to get carried away towards my destination by a habitual combination of metro, bus and plane, something occurred to me for the too many-eth time: I literally started to walk into life with a book in hand. My father insists that this is how I fancied taking my very first steps as a toddler: by furtively grabbing a book and starting off with it in that funny walking fashion that reminds of a rough night at the pub. To give me better balance, dad caught me and put a second book under my other arm. And that was it: walking happened.

Wherever I travel to, trust me to always have a good book for company. I’m one of those people who actually enjoy silence and the possibility of introspection on the road. I like to listen to my thoughts and feed them, cultivate them, let them wander and come back to me deeper than before. During the camping evenings on the Inca Trail in Peru, wrapped up in a sleeping bag, I read “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer in my tiny tent, lighting the pages with a head torch. It felt greatly adventurous under the circumstances if slightly unsettling since it develops on the true story of a young man who discovers the freedom of ultimate solo travel but dies because of it. It is, no doubt here, an amazing read and a ravaging insight into a traveller’s soul that any person who is a wander at heart should dive into, I believe.

In preparation for a travel to Sumatra, Indonesia I started reading “Krakatoa – the Day the World Exploded” by Simon Winchester. Now that enhanced the thrill of the experience I was about to live and gave me a sense of where I was going, if ever my booking left me with any doubts: the Pacific Ring of Fire. The book is a complex account of one of the largest catastrophe’s the world has faced so far – the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, of course – and is sprinkled with a fair amount of local history as well as highlights of the glorious days of the first explorers and colonisers. It is interesting and documented, though rather charmless from a literary point of view. But if you’re headed to Indonesia, you might as well give it a chance.

And ah, South Africa! I first travelled in mind there thanks to the stimulating, romantic and absolutely mind racing stories of one of the best adventure writers alive, Wilbur Smith, and his Courtney series. The man had me dream of this country before I could actually see it. He clearly inspired me to travel there. Or was it Sean Courtney?

Travel mates can be buggers. Sometimes the landscape may not be particularly gratifying and for having counted a long series of leafless trees on a recent trip through the States and Canada I can confirm that watching out the window for long hours will not always leave you breathless. Maybe you’re bored and possibly can’t sleep. In those moments, what you really, really want is to open a book. My personal recommendation is to travel with Bill Bryson.

The first book I read by him was “Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe” and I found myself in the embarrassing circumstance of bursting into laughter in the public transport. So the danger is real and it’s reassuring to know that I was not an isolated case of this new (to me) kind of public embarrassment. As it turns out, there are more of us out there taking the metro with a Bill Bryson book, laughing their heads off and embracing the risk of being mentally labelled as poor innocents: http://bit.ly/1C5P0qL.

Bryson has become a sort of best friend and as it so happens with some best friends who do not live close by, I miss his humour, the enlightened, jovial tone of his stories and his personal travel undertakings which sometimes end in such a wonderfully comic catastrophe. His books are guaranteed to have a gripping, long-lasting effect on me.

I later went on with “Notes from a Small Island” which tells about his discovery and first-hand observations of  Britain and Britishness and continued with “Notes from a Big Country” where he wrestles with aspects of American life. Finally, I have just finished “A Walk in the Woods” and found it exceptional and as close to perfection as a book can get. Bryson is unbelievably gifted when it comes to decorticating details and explaining otherwise unfathomable and hard to describe feelings, thoughts and behaviours. How he puts that into such unique and mesmerising English is a source of wonder and makes me read his sentences again and again. Bill is magic. I can’t imagine anyone reading one of his books and not be immediately turned into a fan.

“A walk in the Woods” is about encounters:

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the
Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.

But most of all, it is an invigorating encouragement to go hiking and lose yourself to the nature:

We took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our trousers, and stepped gingerly into the frigid water. The stones on the bottom were all shapes and sizes – flat, egg-shaped, domed – very hard on the feet, and covered with a filmy green slime that was ludicrously slippery. I hadn’t gone three steps when my feet skated and I fell painfully on my ass. I struggled halfway to my feet, but slipped and fell again; struggled up, staggered sideways a yard or two and pitched helplessly forward, breaking my fall with my hands and ending up in the water doggie-style. As I landed, my pack slid forward and my boots, tied to its frame by their laces, were hurled into a kind of contained orbit; they flew round the side of the pack in a long, rather pretty trajectory, and came to a halt against my head, then plunked into the water where they dangled in the current.

Moral of the story: read Bryson and/or travel with a book – it is bound to give you balance.

P.S. Though I firmly believe a book will always fit into a backpack, I might give Kindle a go one of these days to see how quickly I can adjust to modern day travelling. But I do love books in their printed version and what would make me at least as happy as great content is more use of recycled paper in the publishing industry. So that “A Walk in the Woods” can still be possible in years to come.