Book Cover

Destination: Southeast Asia

Book: 30 Reasons to Travel: Photographs and Reflections from Southeast Asia, by Joel Carillet

A Guest post by Dr. Jessie Voigts

This is a treasure-trove of photos and text that encourage thinking and learning about travel, others, and the common joys of humanity.  I’ve not read a book that was so very thoughtful about people and places. I’ve lived in Japan, but not yet traveled to Southeast Asia. This book was an enticing look into cultures that are new to me.

One of my favorite reasons to travel, in this book, was Bac Ha’s Sunday Market. Joel describes the Vietnamese market, full of Flower Hmong in colorful costumes, “brought to mind a Henri Matisse painting run amok.”  The photos accompanying this essay, indeed, show us the bright colors and marvelous embroidery that this culture is so famous for.

Perhaps for me, the best of the book is the underlying premise that the choices that we make in life, and in travel, contribute to our experiences. As an intercultural educator, I truly believe that to explore a culture fully, we must open our eyes, hearts, and minds. This book does just that.

I was lucky enough to sit down and talk with Joel about his new book. Here’s what he had to say…

Wandering Educators: Please tell us about your new book, 30 Reasons to Travel…

Joel Carillet: For several years I’ve published stories in magazine, anthologies, and on the web that dealt with specific places and people, but I’ve never had a format with which I could create an overarching argument for why travel is so valuable.  30 Reasons to Travel, my first book, gave me this format.

Through both word and image, the book invites the reader to consider how he or she is part of a journey that the world itself is already on.  A lot of “list books” have been published in the last ten years (e.g., 1000 Places to See Before You Die), but what sets this one apart–in addition to its more than 275 photographs–is its more reflective nature.  If you want a book that will tell you about plush hotels or the best places to get a tan, this isn’t for you.  But if you want to consider the beauty of laughter, the value of holding a child of another race, or what a meaningful souvenir may look like, you’ll probably like 30 Reasons to Travel.

In putting the book together, I kept two interrelated realities in mind:  First, not everyone can or does travel abroad.  Second, many lessons of travel also have application in one’s own home or neighborhood.  And so each of the 30 reasons is intended to provide food for thought not only for those who travel but also for those who say close to home.

As for structure, the book is divided into 30 sections comprised of a short story or reflection accompanied by photographs.

WE: What is your travel philosophy? You’re a very intercultural traveler…

JC: Neither I nor the book argue that there is only one way to approach travel.  Each person is different and so what each person takes into the experience of travel is different.

Having said that, my philosophy–and what I encourage others to consider–is that travel is one of the best ways we have to enrich our understanding of what it means to be human.  The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber wrote that “all actual life is encounter,” and I think he’s right.  Not only do we encounter new people abroad, we also encounter ourselves in a new way.  We’re enriched as we meet people, cultures, and issues outside our usual context, and hopefully others are enriched by us as well.  Travel nurtures a sense of interrelatedness and leaves us dissatisfied with knowing the world merely through a television screen or newsprint, because travel shows us that you can’t actually get to know the world this way–and on occasion get it just plain wrong.

You can read more of the interview at Wandering Educators.

Dr. Jessie Voigts is the Publisher of  WanderingEducators.com and contributes each month to A Traveler’s Library. She has a doctorate in International Education, and is passionate about intercultural learning. She and her husband are Worldschooling their daughter, and enjoying every minute of it. She is also a nature photographer and lives on a lake.

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Going to Vietnam? How about Argentina? National Geographic Traveler has new guidebooks on those two countries (revised Vietnam, brand new Argentina) and I review them for my friends at Indie Travel Podcast.

Now read on for a guide to a different kind of road trip on the U.S. Mother Road.

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Jungle scene

Destination: Africa

Book: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A Guest Post by Craig Martin

I read voraciously and used to read even more. Four books a week seems slow when I include the audiobooks that accompany me on countless hours of train and plane travel. But when I’m asked to talk about a book that has motivated me to visit a place or to start traveling, I’m somewhat at a loss.
One book that’s heavily influenced my view of the world is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , made into the film Apocalypse Now by director Francis Ford Coppola. In Heart of Darkness, the protagonist Marlow recounts a journey from Britain deep into the Congo. It’s a story of a journey, of imperialism and of the madness that lurks just behind the thin walls of sanity.

It’s tough reading at times, with long sentences bursting with imagery and hints through a sharp use of vocabulary and tone. It rewards, if you can call it that, with a slow, meandering journey up a river and an ending that doesn’t really satisfy the readers’ narrative impulses. For that, I love it.

Critic Chinua Achebe infamously called Heart of Darkness an inveterate piece of racism as it uses the African people and landscape as nothing more than a foil for European protagonists; the dehumanised indigenous characters are nothing but backdrop. This resonates with my own post-colonial Pakeha* reading and is an urgent call to action for travelers and writers to move beyond stereotypes, stop casting ourselves as the heroes of our stories and start to uncover the threads of narrative we travel through.

In the end, Heart of Darkness is a book that has inspired me to stretch my viewpoint, to act compassionately for social justice, to travel. Otherwise, we may well end up in a culture as happily blinded to our societal prejudices as Conrad was.

Craig Martin

Craig Martin is the co-publisher of the Indie Travel Podcast and Indie Travel Podcast Magazine. Along with Victorian literature, he enjoys self-reflective movies and the better sort of modern Fantasy novels.

* Pakeha is a term used to describe the non-Maori peoples of New Zealand, especially those of European descent.

Thank you so much, Craig, for taking time to do this. For those of you who haven’t read about Craig and Linda Martin on their website (which I recommend you do as soon as you have left a comment below), Craig and his wife live on the road, so making a contribution like this, in addition to their blogging and publishing a magazine keeps them busy indeed. And thanks also, for adding the word pakeha to my vocabulary.

I would like to clarify one thing for those who are more familiar with the movie Apocalypse Now than with the novel, Heart of Darkness. Coppola very loosely based his film on the Conrad novel, which, as Craig says, is set in Africa as opposed to the Vietnam setting of the movie.

Craig’s point is a very good one. As travelers we need to constantly redevelop the sensitivity to realize when we are influenced by stereotypes and find ways to move beyond them.  Have you found other books that help you do that? Please let us know in the comment section.

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book: The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate

When I talked to Candy Harrington about writing a post for A Traveler’s Library, she apologized because the book that came to mind was ” a little dorky.”  Hey, any book that inspires travel fits on the shelves of A Traveler’s Library.

Candy writes much-needed informational articles and books about accessible travel. The third edition of, Barrier Free Travels: A Nuts and Bolts Guide for Wheelers and Slow Walkers hit the shelves June 16, and if you are one of those who hesitate to travel because you need help getting around, or if you know someone who fits that description, check Candy’s immensely helpful guide.

Now let’s see what she learned about Vietnam from her dorky book.

Good Morning Vietnam

I grew up hating Vietnam.

Booby-trapped entrance to a Cu Chi tunnel, Vietnam

My first recollection of the country was on the nightly news — something called the casualty report. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I knew from my mom’s reaction that it wasn’t very good. As I grew up and entered high school the war became more personal for me. My friends were drafted and went off to fight. Many never returned, and those that did come home were forever changed. I truly hated everything associated with this horrible event that took my friends from me — including the entire country of Vietnam.

Fast forward some 20 years when a friend gave me the book, The Tunnels of Cu Chi, by Tom Mangold and John Penycate. He thought I would like it, but I was unimpressed; so I just stuck it in my behemoth of a purse. Later that week, I pulled it out while I was waiting impatiently in a bleak surgical center.  And much to surprise I couldn’t put the book down. It simply captivated me.

Written by two tunnel rats, the book is a compilation of their adventures in the 200-miles of tunnels constructed and used by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war. It was the authors’ job to find the tunnels, enter them, disarm the booby traps and fight the Viet Cong, many times in total darkness. The book told of the danger of entering the tunnels, with grenades, bullets, punji stakes and spears poised to ward off interlopers. And it told of the underground communities; with whole families living there and even raising there children in these subterranean chambers.

Hidden entrance to the Cu Chi Tunnels, Vietnam

The more I read, the more I was compelled to visit Vietnam. And as luck would have it, the embargo against travel to Vietnam had been recently lifted.

Six months later I landed in Ho Chi Minh City. Through my travel writer colleagues I was able to find a friend of a friend of a friend who had a car and who would take me out to Cu Chi. We met for the first time at the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel; and after sharing a few 333 beers we agreed to head off the following morning.

It was a journey I’ll never forget, down a rutted dirt road, lined with roadside vendors selling gas from plastic containers. We stopped at the fabulous Cao Dai Temple in Tay Ninh, before heading on to Cu Chi. Once there we walked through the jungle to a small clearing, where two kids offered to guide us through the tunnels. We crawled though, just as the tunnel rats did, passing the disabled punji sticks and squeezing through tiny passageways before emerging into cavernous rooms.

The Cao Dai Temple in Tay Ninh, Vietnam

I spent several hours there, and during that time in some small way I made peace with the country.

I no longer hated Vietnam.

It’s amazing what a good book can do.

———-

Candy Harrington is the editor of Emerging Horizons and the author of several best-selling guide books for disabled travelers, including her newest release, the third edition of Barrier Free Travel; A Nuts and Bolts Guide for Wheelers and Slow Walkers.

She also blogs regularly about accessible travel issues at Barrier Free Travels.

Do you have suggestions for off-beat books that have lured you to foreign destinations?  Please share. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Related reading at A Traveler’s Library: The Quiet American, Books on Vietnam, More books on Vietnam.

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Book: The Quiet American by Graham Greene

(I need to add a P.S. –although it’s at the beginning, not the end, so make that Pre-Script.) In thinking about what I wrote here, and watching the video above, I suddenly realized that the movie of The Quiet American was probably what instilled in me a strong desire to travel to Vietnam. So there you have it. A travel book/movie.

What struck me as uncanny about [amazonify]0143039024::text::::The Quiet American[/amazonify]was how much the book foretold the next decade when the Americans were in Vietnam.  I had seen [amazonify]B00005JLXB::text::::the 2002 movie[/amazonify] with Michael Caine playing the cynical British war correspondent, but even though it came AFTER the war, I still missed the way that American behavior aped the failed attitudes of the French. Not that I accept Greene’s arguments.

The beautiful Vietnamese girl, Phuong, says little and reveals nothing about her true feelings–a perfect symbol for the inscrutable Vietnam that neither the French, the British nor the Americans can understand. Fowler, the Brit, willingly deals with the communists to get rid of his rival, Pyle.

A 1956 review of the book in the New York Times puts some of Greene’s political thinking in perspective. “He had visited the Communist territories and been much impressed by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh.” they say.

In reading anything by Greene, you have to get past his obsession with Roman Catholicism.  The protagonist will inevitably be a non-beliver who is closely related to a believer and is plagued with guilt over whatever…in this case infidelity. In this case he is pitted against an impossibly gullible American (the experienced and knowing British empire against the naive America).

And from the point of view of religion, what are we to make of the fact that the guileless, optimistic young American loses out to the cynical, opium-smoking Fowler? Perhaps who wins in life doesn’t count. It is only the afterlife that matters?

Meanwhile, philosophy and politics aside, Greene tells a good story with romance and adventure and crisp dialogue. It belongs in the travelers library for the light it casts on a Vietnam that is mostly, but not entirely in the past.

Here is  a half-hour background feature on the making of the movie, The Quiet American.

Have you read Graham Greene? What is your opinion of his books?

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Vietnam at China Beach

Destination: Vietnam

Books: The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh

Hell in a Very Small Place and Street Without Joy by Bernard Fall

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Today I am giving you some more book recommendations for Vietnam, and a question. Have you recently seen the Continental Hotel in Saigon? Traveler’s Bro wants to know.

I received  such wonderful responses when I asked people to recommend books on ten specific places, that I want to share some more of them.  You may have seen the books on Vietnam, recommended by Andrea Ross of Journey’s Within tours and Bed & Breakfast in Cambodia.

With the previous post on Vietnam, I forgot to include a recommendation from Wandering Eds, so here is the link to an article about the book The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, presented lovingly in a review by Joel Carillet.

Traveler’s Bro posted a couple of recommendations and a question for readers of this blog, and I post it in its entirety below.

“Other worthy works on Vietnam before the ‘American War’ there:  Bernard B. Fall’s  Hell in a Very Small Place and Street without Joy. These provide history lessons with literary quality. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American expresses the bitter old Euro-imperialist’s disgust with Americans’ brash optimisim about saving the Vietnamese for liberal democracy. Sadly, it can now be considered prophetic. (It led me to pay a visit to the old Continental Hotel during the late war. The open bar-veranda seemed to invite VC grenade tossing, but I was told the management bribed the bad guys to stay away. In 1969 it still had the old colonial “puka” feel about it: waiters in clean white jackets delivering cocktails to international patrons while a few miles away the war roared on. Anyone visited there recently? Has anything really changed or does it remain a restful cul-de-sac of colonial history?)”

Please let us know if you’ve been to the Continental Hotel in Saigon. And keep the recommendations coming. Thanks for all the help. We will be using reader recommendations for books on Scotland and Australia  and Sweden in upcoming posts.

Photograph by Amit K (Sydney) obtained through Flickr with permission of photographer. Click on the picture to see more by this amazine photographer.

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.

Vietnamese Lanterns

Destination: Vietnam

Book: Catfish and Mandala

Movie:

• Good Morning Vietnam
• Apocalypse Now

Continuing my tour of Southeast Asia…

Because I loved the seaside of Thailand and the countryside of both Thailand and Cambodia, I yearn to travel to Vietnam.  A friend recommended for the traveler’s library the excellent book [amazonify]0312267177::text::::Catfish and Mandala: A Two Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam[/amazonify] by Andrew W. Pham. It is a realistic portrait of Vietnam by a Vietnamese man who goes back to his country after the war. His family had escaped to America when he was ten, so he is more American than Vietnamese when he returns as a thirty-year-old. The reader benefits by his recollections of what used to be and observations of what is.

Pham later wrote the book,  The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars about the period between 1940 and 1976 in Vietnam. I have not read that one, but if I schedule a trip to Vietnam, it will definitely be on my list of travel literature. My first knowledge of Southeast Asia came from a missionary who visited the small town I lived in as a girl. He talked about this jungle-covered land called Indochina, ruled by the French. He told us that there were rebels who wanted to overthrow the French and he saw a future of war and great difficulties for the gentle people who lived there.

In the literature of Vietnam, we include the many books where returning American soldiers have tried to express their feelings about the American war, as the Vietnamese call it, but I have shied away from war books. Americans have also tried to come to terms with their feelings about the Vietnamese war in several films, notably the dramatic The Year of Living Dangerously, the comic Good Morning Vietnam, and the, well, apocalyptic, Apocalypse Now. I have seen all of these, and appreciate the brilliance of Apocalypse Now, but feel I learned more from The Year of Living Dangerously.

Andrea Ross, an American who, with her husband, runs a bed and breakfast in Cambodia and a tour company called Journeys Within, responded to my request for reader suggestions for ten places with this list of books for Vietnam. (The comments are Andrea’s):

[amazonify]1586481835::text::::Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns, [/amazonify]David Lamb. A Vietnam war reporter David Lamb returns to Vietnam thirty years later to cover the peace and give us an insight into the war, the country and its people.
Catfish and Mandala, Andrew X. Pham. Part memoir and part travel narrative. Tells of the authors escape from and then return to Vietnam
[amazonify]0452271681::text::::When Heaven and Earth Changed Places,[/amazonify] Le Ly Hayslip. A Vietnamese woman’s journey thru war to peace.
[amazonify]0140280219::text::::The Girl in the Picture, Denise Chong[/amazonify]. The story of Kim Phuc, the little girl captured in an award winning photograph as she ran from her village which had been accidentally napalm bombed.

The following are considered some of the better-than-most accounts of what it was like to be an American soldier in Vietnam:
[amazonify]0671638866::text::::Born on the Fourth of July,[/amazonify] Ron Kovic
[amazonify]1417823801::text::::Dispatches,[/amazonify] Michael Herr
[amazonify]0143035711::text::::Chickenhawk,[/amazonify] Robert Mason

You can learn more about Andrea at her web site, Journeys Within.

Your turn. What are your thoughts about Vietnam? What have you read? What movies about Vietnam do you like?

Photo by “Amit (Sydney)” from Flickr under Creative Commons license

Print PDF

This content is a post from: A Traveler's Library To comment on this post or search for related information, click on the link to A Traveler's Library. We'll leave a light on for you.

©2012 A Traveler's Library. All Rights Reserved.