Destination: Africa

Book: One Day I Will Write About This Place (NEW August 2011) by Binyavanga Wainaina

(NOTE: After I wrote and titled this review, I carefully read Binyavanga Wainaina’s sardonic instructions on “How to Write About Africa” in the magazine Granta. You may want to check as you compile your Africa reading list.)

Binyavanga Wainaina reinvents memoir writing in One Day I Will Write About This Place.  I read two or three books a week and many of them are very, very fine writing, but this one knocked me back in my chair and made me reconsider the conventions of writing. Original. Poetic. Surprising. Experimental. He sees and hears and feels the world in ways you never thought of before.  Right from the first page, this book is a WOW experience. In this quote, he is describing a day playing soccer in Kenya when he was seven.

Warm breath pushes down my nostrils past my mouth and divides my chin.  I can see the pink shining flesh of my eyelids. Random sounds fall into my ears: cars, birds, black mamba bicycle bells, distant children, dogs, crows, and afternoon national radio music. Congo rumba.  People outside our compound are talking, in languages I know the sounds of, but do not understand or speak, Luhya, Gikuyu.

Maybe it is this early exposure to various languages that seem to be sounds without meaning that creates an approach to language that seems as much incantation as communication. These verbal meanderings come across as playful and spontaneous, but in fact are carefully crafted, because, as he says while contemplating the words “thirst and thirsty”, ”Words, I think, must be concrete things.  Surely they cannot be suggestions of things, vague pictures: scattered, shifting sensations.” Nothing escapes him.

One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees.  The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings.  Water from the showerhead streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.  

All together they are: shhhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhh is made up of many many tinny tiny ting ting tings, so small that clanking glass sounds become soft whispers; like when everything at the school parade is talking all at once, it is different from when one person is talking.

This reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s love of words which bursts out in his poem, The Bells, when he finds words to mimic the sounds of the bells from tinkling to tolling, and extols the “tintinabulation of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.” Wainaina knows very early that he is meant to be a writer and spends all his money on novels and all his time reading. He says, (as many writers have discovered)  ”I…start to write and answers arrive, and after a while I realize I have followed a straight line and I am done.” But as a young man, the impressions of the world are overwhelming. “I do not have enough words for all of this,” he says. Eventually, he sends off a travel narrative to an Internet site and is paid for it. He is a professional writer.

But One Day I Will Write About This Place is much more than a travel memoir.  Instead, he uses the journeys he made through Africa to add to the picture  of the struggles that ripple over the continent.  Kenyans grow up saying, “We are not like those Ugandans,” but then the tribal conflicts emerge in Kenya as well. Because he is identified as Gikuyu, even though he does not feel that identity strongly (he just wants to be Kenyan) he and his family are in danger when the government turns anti-Gikuyu.  Even before the most dangerous period, his brilliance and high grades are not enough to get him into a top high school because he has the wrong identity. This awareness of dominant and minority groups sharpens Wainaina’s observations of other parts of Africa.

From childhood games, the influence of American culture, hairstyles and clothing choices, the book progress to corrupt politics and shockingly bloody oppression and reprisals. Wainaina depicts an Africa where real people live (see Granta article referenced at top)–an Africa that will stay in your mind.

He finds hope in the fact that Uganda has rebuilt itself. “This country gives me hope that this continent is not, finally incontinent.”

The light Wainaina sheds on “the dark continent” and his strikingly original expression make this book a must for the traveler’s library. And a real find for anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of Africa.

Having won several literary awards and started a literary journal Kwani? (why not?), he now teaches at the Chinua Achebe (See Things Fall Apart review) Center for African Writers and Artists at Bard College in upstate New York.

The book title is linked to Amazon for your convenience. If you click through to Amazon and purchase anything at all, I get a few cents which helps support A Traveler’s Library. Thanks.

I am visiting Africa through literature on a semi-regular basis, as I try to expand my woefully small pool of knowledge. I welcome guest posts on books about Africa that may have inspired you, or suggestions to add to my reading list. And you can enter the Book Giveaway when you leave a comment, subscribe to A Traveler’s Library, or add your name in other ways. (See the rules here, and the list of books here.)

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Book: Ionia: A Quest,  by Freya Stark, new edition of a travel classic

Read a terrific interview with Freya Stark in her eighties.

(This is the third of a series of posts about women travel writers, in conjunction with the release of the movie Eat, Pray, Love)

A road in Ephesus

This book, Ionia: A Quest, tells of a journey that the famous travel writer Freya Stark make in the mid 1950s down the west coast of Turkey. At the time, Greece had only recently withdrawn from the coast of Turkey, lands that have been disputed as long as anyone has been keeping records.

Unlike the current crop of travel writers, who start with themselves and radiate outward, Stark does not  share her personal motivations and she does not travel to heal something in her soul. She ponders larger questions such as the rise and fall of cities. She follows Herodotus,and other classical writers. Herodotus said that he wrote of smaller cities as well as greater, because the great cities were once small and the small ones might some day become great, and she visited the twelve cities (today some would have been minor towns) of classical Ionia.  Stark thinks that there may be some secret to life that these ancients living on the edge of the Aegean had, that we are missing.

…Yet words may reconstruct the landscapes and the thoughts they gave; and the right words have a magic to call up what is not there–the foot as light as thistledown and gone, the robe that is only a silken rustle disappearing, the beam flashing quicker than sight–these things may appear, evoked from their reality as fragments of words or pottery or bronze or marble evoke them, through twenty-five centuries of time.

This passage shows what I think is her strength, combining a poetic presentation with philosophical musings against a factual historical background.  Despite the devotion to historical detail, Stark succumbs to the romanticism that seemed to veil every description of that part of the world from Byron to rather recently. She calls this a “land with history for all its dusty silence.”

I only set foot in Turkey once, but it was a wonderful day that I would like to repeat and extend.  Ken and I arrived by ferry from Athens to Samos, and although the restrictions may have changed, we had to spend the night on the island before making the very short sail to Kusadasi in Turkey. A few days ago, Travellogged wrote this great description of Ephesus, our destination, and one of Freya Stark’s Ionian cities. The site is simply spectacular, but when Stark was there in the mid-1950′s the ruins had not been excavated and reconstructed and the tourist office  told her not to bother.

She actually preferred areas where the ruins still lay scattered on the ground and she was left to conjure the life that once filled the hillsides around them. Today many of those sites have been excavated, at least partially, but there was no tourism industry when Stark was there. Or rather, the only tourists stuck to the shore and heavy drinking, rather than following in the steps of Herodotus, Alexander and Anthony and Cleopatra.

Our trip to Turkey was streamlined and painless compared to the adventures of Freya Stark just forty years before. She explored and wrote about places where women rarely went alone, particularly about the Arab countries. One of the few personal incidents related  in Ionia relates how she had to pay for two beds in a three-bed room in order to assure that she would have privacy in a provincial town in Turkey. She explains that men would have to wash at a basin in the hall, but she brought two basins–one to wash and one to rinse–along with her to ensure her privacy.

As I read, I think that she is writing a book about a forgotten time –not just the time of the Myceneans and the Greeks, but of the post-war period when Turkey was just beginning to become a modern nation, and archaeological tourism had not flooded the coast. But then I remind myself that every travel writer writes for a time in the future that will only dimly understand our present. The quality of travel writing might improve if today’s writers kept that in mind.

Although Stark modestly proclaims her inexperience of Ancient History and provides footnotes for a reader who wishes to learn where she got her opinions, modern readers who know as much as she did or will even be tempted to follow the footnotes are probably rare. If you take on this book, and are tempted to give up because of the piling on of ancient history, just skim the history and read this classic for her personal descriptions of the landscape and people of her own day.

If you are building a shelf of travel classics in your travel library, be sure to include Freya Stark. Her quotes from ancient writers alone brought me much joy, let alone her eloquent writing.

This is another in that great series of re-issued classics from Palgrave-McMillan, who supplied a review copy. I have previously talked about their reissues of Norman Douglas’ Old Calabria and the great guide Strolling Through Istanbul. The photo of Ephesus is from Flickr with a Creative Commons license. Click on the photo for more information on the photographer.

Have you shared your favorite travel classic here? Would you read Freya Stark before touring the west coast of Turkey?

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Book Cover

Destination: The World

Book: Life is a Trip:The Magic of Transformative Travel (NEW August 2010) by Judith Fein

I first met Judith Fein when I was on a press trip in Richmond Virginia. She and her husband Paul took off from the main group tramping through Civil War Battlefields to look for something out of the ordinary–the oldest Jewish cemetery in Virginia. That’s what they do, poor things–live in Santa Fe, travel the world in search of interesting stories, and write and photograph award winning articles.

(This is the 2nd of my offerings about women travel writers as the world goes ga-ga over the movie Eat, Pray, Love.)

Judith is half of the team that started the web site Your Life Is a Trip, where she and Ellen Barone enlist other travel writers to go beyond the usual go-there-do-this-do-that kind of travel writing.(And in full disclosure, I am one of the occasional contributors to that site.) Fein’s new book, Life is a Trip: The Transformational Magic of Travel, tells about her experiences in cultures from South America to Southeast Asia, and how those experiences touched her life. She talked to ATL after returning from a trip where she learned Viking chants in Scandinavia–just your everyday travel experience for Judith Fein.

Vietnam

A Traveler’s Library: You talk about the subject “forgiveness” in your trip
to North Vietnam. Did you also visit South Vietnam? And if so, how did their
reaction to the war differ?

Judith Fein: Almost all of our time was spent in North Vietnam. In South Vietnam, in Ho Chi Minh City, there is a startling museum about what they call The American War. When we visited, there was a group of school children taking notes from exhibits. To them, the war was a remote event in history. Something that could show up on a test and be summed up in a few sentences. It was shocking to me. I asked several people how they felt about the war. They were forgiving. They wanted to put it behind them. The lesson about forgiveness was huge.

Curandera in Mexico

ATL: I think my favorite story was the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, where you became an apprentice to a Mexican curandera. But I wondered as I read the ending if you ever
felt that you let her down by not becoming a full time healer? After all,
she selected you as an apprentice, implying that you were learning the
trade.
JF: What a wonderful question. Why wonderful? Because it makes me ponder the effect of my decision on Ana. And then it makes me think about trust. Ana and I, who didn’t share a culture or language or history, somehow made a great leap together over the chasm of doubt, demands and expectations. We believed in each other. We have never had a conversation about whether or not I became a full-time healer. She generously provided me with the tools, and she believed I would know how to use those precious skills. I suppose you could say, Vera, that my life is about healing, even though I do not do it formally or full-time. I try to bring that energy to every interaction I have. And when I sat down to write my book, it sat down right along side of me.

ATL: To your knowledge did Ana train other “apprentices”? Is that a regular
practice?

To the best of my knowledge, Ana does not train apprentices. I know she spends a day or two with a group of nurses every year, initiating them into the world of native healing so they can understand the needs and beliefs of some of their patients.

ATL:  Have all these experiences with self-discovery in diverse cultures made you look for similar opportunities within your own culture? Or is that another book?

JF: I always look for opportunities with diverse cultures. When I read the local paper, I wildly circle every event that involves another culture. I go to these events to observe, interact and learn. I go to be moved, changed, educated. But it doesn’t even have to be an event. When I stand in line at the movies, or meet a waitperson in a restaurant, I’m always excited when I meet someone from another culture. It’s an opportunity to expand into another reality; it’s a chance to grow.

Judith Fein

This is where I usually asks authors to tell us about their own favorite travel book(s), but Judith answered that question for us some months ago in a guest post. Judith’s book was supplied by the publisher, Spirituality and Heath Books, for this review. Photos are courtesy of Paul Ross, and you can see more of his work by clicking on one of the photos.

And, readers, would you care to share the most transformative experience you have had in your travels? If that word is too scary, how about the most moving? Influential? Revealing?

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Mt. Cuba forest path

I have an article on the website of  National Geographic Traveler–a road trip through duPont country in Delaware and Pennsylvania. (How timely for the Great American Road Trip!)

Trout Pond at Hidden Meadow Ranch

And a road trip to northern Arizona lands at Hidden Meadow Ranch in this guest post at Writing Horseback.

I am very active in the blogger community and have written guest posts for the following blogs/websites:

Info Ireland: Books from the Blasket Islands (Feb. 09)(You’ll have to search when you get to the site.)

Spot Cool Stuff : The Miracle of Siphnos

Velvet Escape: The master potter of Mata Ortiz, Mexico

Go Packbacking : Six Tips for taking the ferry in Greece.

Wasabimon: Food allergy translation cards

Writing Horseback: Tanque Verde Guest Ranch

Velvet Escape: Tohono Chul Park in Tucson

Travel Wonders: Canyon de Chelly

foXnoMad: The Minoans of Crete

Photos by Vera Marie Badertscher. All rights reserved.

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

Virgin Airlines and V-Hip Hotels choose a travel laureate, tasked with writing fiction to inspire off the beaten track travel. Our kind of guy.

COMING SOON: THE REALLY ULTIMATE TRAVEL MOVIE
Fun article by an extra in Eat PrayLove (Thanks to World Hum)

NEW ZEALAND NAMES BEST TRAVEL WRITERS AND BOOK

Under the Huang Jiao Tree by Jane Carswell won the Grand Prize. Read more at the Travcom site,  who co-sponsors of the event with Whitcoullis, an online bookstore. Other awards are sponsored by Cathay Pacific for magazine and newspaper, but not for bloggers.   (:-(

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There I was wondering what on earth I could write about for my 200th POST, when my Blackberry blinked and buzzed and delivered up this article from Last Friday’s Guardian newspaper.  William Dalrymple’s thoughts on travel literature deserve a reading because he is one of the greats of travel writing himself. But what he has written in the Guardian also deserves a lot of discussion.

I hope to start some of that discussion right here.  (Wouldn’t it be fun to have a roundtable discussion with some of the Travel Insights 100 about this one?)

Here are some of the statements in his piece.

It wasn’t just that publishers were not as receptive as they had once been to the genre, nor that the big bookshops had contracted their literary travel writing sections from prominent shelves at the front to little annexes at the back, usually lost under a great phalanx of Lonely Planet guidebooks. More seriously, and certainly more irreversibly, most of the great travel writers were either dead or dying.

Oh, please. Of course the travel writers of a former age are dying, but new writers constantly appear to take their place. And as for mediocre travel writing, from Victorian times through the 1940′s just about everyone who graduated college in England traveled and wrote about it. Early bloggers?

He does acknowledge some fine newer writers, but does not believe they are in the same league as Eric Newby, William Thesiger, and Norman Lewis, who passed away in the last few years. I also lament the loss of these writers, and know that my own personal favorite, Patrick Leigh Fermor is in his nineties and feeble, but that does not mean travel writing is dead.

First he sympathizes with the academic view that travel writers from the West have patronized the East.

But the attitudes of today’s travel writers are hardly those of the Brideshead generation, and as Colin Thubron has pointed out, it is ridiculously simplistic to see all attempts at studying, observing and empathising with another culture necessarily “as an act of domination”.

Then he says it isn’t so.

Also, travellers tend by their very natures to be rebels and outcasts and misfits: far from being an act of cultural imperialism, setting out alone and vulnerable on the road is often an expression of rejection of home and an embrace of the other.

Is this true? or a sweeping generalization?

…is there really any point to the genre in the age of the internet, when you can instantly gather reliable knowledge about anywhere in the globe?

Ahh, all writers of any genre better hang it up, then because Wikipedia can do it for us.

Dalrymple has lived in India for some time (gone native, as they would have said during the Raj) and so, surprise, surprise, he finds a batch of writers with ties to India to be among the best travel writers today. AND, more surprise, he thinks that settling in to live in one foreign culture for an extended period will yield the best writing.

He ends on a much more upbeat note with a quote from William Thubron

A good travel writer can give you the warp and weft of everyday life, the generalities of people’s existence that are rarely reflected in journalism, and hardly touched on by any other discipline. Despite the internet and the revolution in communications, there is still no substitute.

This article contains fascinating details from Dalrymple’s life in India and recollections of some of the late travel writers.  I look forward to reading his new book, to be published next month, and would not even mind if the Bloomsbury sent me an ARC (hint!), but I have very mixed feelings about the contradictory and self-serving arguments used in this article. (And according to the comment section one of the new writers he praised is his niece. Is that playing fair?)

Please join the conversation about the future of travel writing. (And if you read Dalrymple’s article, don’t miss the comments on a different page.)

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Travel Insights 100 Travel Expert's Badge

Today we are reading poll results.

Since we read anything that inspires and informs travel, it seems appropriate to read what the Travel Insights 100–travel writers and bloggers, including moi--have to say.

The Travel Insights 100, officially launched yesterday. Participants have permission to discuss the results of a poll regarding Twitter, but only if you (yes, I’m talkin’ to you) promise that you will join the discussion of Twitter.  Members of Travel Insight 100 are travel writers, travel industry professionals, advisors and analysts, and travel bloggers. Questions did not draw 100 answers because the travel writers were, well, traveling–or maybe writing. Okay, here are just a few of the things that I found most interesting in this poll.

Twitter

First, since 97% of the respondents are on twitter, and 56% checked Twitter more than four times a day, it is safe to say that this is a very social-networking-kind-of-group.  And as I drilled down into the replies to other questions, I began to get a  picture of why these travel writers and travel professionals find twitter important and useful.

When deciding what they would tweet, the answers varied widely. To me this underscores one of the most endearing qualities of Twitter–the many different voices. The most important consideration to this group was being of interest to their followers, and next came caution about how they were representing themselves or their business. 1/3 talked travel only, and 28% said they tweeted “whatever came into their mind.”

When asked how they decide who to follow, NO ONE said they follow only those that they know.  Twitter is a place to break new ground and find out about new things. Less than 1/4  follow only those who are tweeting about travel. Many, many comments stressed that this group checks out the people who follow them and are “picky” about who they follow. They are looking for intelligent people with interesting posts.

However, if you want these picky people to pick you, here are some clues. They like people who find a mix of professional or business tweets with personal. Top no-nos are sending so many tweets that you flood my account or spend all your time tweeting self-promotion. In a related vein, being “too corporate” is looked down upon.  Do try to be clever because this crew does not like “mundane.”

The travel experts suggested so many links to articles about Twitter and travel, that I think I’ll save that list for another day.

Now, your turn. Are you on Twitter? If so, how do you decide who to follow? How do you decide what to tweet? Do you get travel info from Twitter? Let’s talk.

P.S. I am writing this on the 17th, and I just noticed that my French word of the day is editeur, meaning ‘publisher.’ How appropriate.

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Destination: Southwest U.S. and Mexico

Day of the Dead Skeleton Mariachi

Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, by Tom Miller

This book about the Southwest was discussed on May 5th, to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. This book is autographed by the author, who is an accomplished travel writer. He has roamed the Southwest and the borderlands with Mexico for many years and brought his stories to many different publications.

(Couldn’t resist this image, even though it is Dia de los Muertos instead of Cinco de Mayo. Art from Lee Hanson, click picture to go to her page.)

It is not too late to enter! Following the rules that you will find when you click here, make a comment on any post or tweet me a reply message @pen4hire.Be sure to follow the rules.

And don’t miss announcements of prizes and winners. Subscribe by RSS feed (click that big obnoxious orange button above) or if you want me to send you each post to your inbox, click here to Subscribe to A Travelers’ Library by Email.

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

Caribbean stormDestination: Caribbean and British Guiana

Book: The Middle Passage by V. S. Naipaul

Quotable Thursday quote: I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. V. S. Naipaul

The question is, if a man writes well, does it matter what kind of human being he is?

I delayed reading V. S. Naipaul because although he is always listed as one of the great travel writers, excerpts indicated that he is of that school that dwells on the negative wherever he goes.  ( I learned after I read the book, that he is an abuser of women and a racist.)

How, I wondered, could Naipaul be so revered as a writer if his travel writing consistently discouraged going to the places he explored? In order to find my own answer, I would have to read his work.

I bought two books, The Middle Passage (1962), his first travel book, and An Area of Darkness (1964) which relates to his first journey to India. In an introduction to the edition I read,  he introduces The Middle Passage as his first travel book, but it was not his first published work. He had already gained a reputation as a writer of fiction by 1962. I unwittingly picked up the two books which drew the most criticism to Naipaul as non-sympathetic to third-world countries.

For those who want to know more about the man behind the writing, Paul Theroux, former friend turned caustic truth-teller,wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow in 1998. An authorized biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, was published in 2008 and is no less disturbing, according to Theroux himself in a lengthy piece for the London Times (unfortunately that article is now available only to subscribers).

In The Middle Passage, Naipaul writes with the observant eye of a sociologist or anthropologist, but without the scientific detachment. The title refers to the route taken by slave ships between Africa and the Caribbean, and tips off his focus in the book.  His visit to Trinidad (where he grew up), British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica constantly circles back to race relations. Allegedly, he is comparing the effect of colonizers from Britain, France and Holland on the West Indies and the northern edge of South America. In fact, he pretty much lumps the colonizers together and lines up with them.

Although he refers to his family history–India to Trinidad to England–he does not openly acknowledge the personal prejudice this brings to his observations.  In each society he mocks the people in power, but lives with them and complains about hardship, while he claims to be wanting to find out about those on the bottom rung and wondering aloud why they don’t feel more pride.  He seeks out connections to slavery and racial division wherever he goes.

The cynicism wears thin, and yet–a big fat “yet”–I don’t believe I have ever read anyone who could as deftly bring to life a character and a setting.  I could see the buildings, rooms, and people he described.

With his pompous air of superiority, Naipaul is not a person I would want to dwell with on a desert island . (Particularly after reading about the way he has treated the women in his life.) However, that biting intelligence and felicity of expression would make for an interesting dinner party.

And, oh, yes, I am going to read the second book.

Now please let me know if the kind of person an author is in “real life” affects your enjoyment of his or her work? Would you rather just not know? Or do you think it is important to know something of the life of the author in order to understand the work?  Let’s have some exchange of views on this. I know you have an opinion.

Photograph by Vera Marie Badertscher. All rights reserved.

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Chickens on the street

Destination: Caribbean Islands

Book: The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor

When last seen in A Traveler’s Library, Patrick Leigh Fermor was hiking across the rough landscape of the Mani peninsula in Greece’s Peloponese.  His journey to the Caribbean came between his adventures in Crete during the war and the many Greek  journeys that he took in the following thirty years.

In The Traveller’s Tree, Fermor tells us about a journey by plane and boat through the islands of the lesser Antilles, Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba in 1946.  Be warned that the islands he described no longer look and sound the way they did when he was there. Life moves on.  But with his fine eye for detail and his love of learning, he brings a depth to the experience of island culture far beyond what you might glean from today’s slick advertising.

St. Lucia beach

His is not a book full of white sands and hammocks slung from palm trees. Instead he quotes frequently from the earliest travel writer to visit the Caribbean, the French Monk, Father Labat, as he weaves a picture of the islands as they are in 1946 against their history, from native Caribs through Columbus to the Europeans who established dominion.

You can read present day guidebooks for weeks on end, and never learn about Labat, to whom Fermor says all students of the area owe a large debt. “He is a sort of monastic West Indian Pepys.  He has the same devouring curiosity and sense of humour and practical flair, and, above all, the same lucid and indefatigable garrulousness. Nothing is too important or too trivial for him to set on record in his vigorous and entertaining prose.”

What more could we ask for in a travel writer than a “devouring curiosity and sense of humor and practical flair?” In my opinion, those same qualities distinguish Fermor.  He talks knowledgeably about the flora and fauna, the music, the food, the clothing and the houses of the people.  He describes in detail the fast-disappearing native Caribs on Dominica and predicts they will be completely gone in a generation or two.  Actually a few still live on the island in the 21st century, their lifestyle changed (improved if made easier and more healthy count for anything).

He says that Castries, St. Lucia seems cursed by fire, citing the last time it burned to the ground in 1927. However, that turned out not to be the last time, for shortly after Fermor visited, Castries burned to the ground one more time. I read the book on my way to St. Lucia, and found myself writing in the margins and earmarking pages to remember gems of information.

Fermor really fell for Haiti. I want to reread that section and see if I can see the relationship between the Haiti he experienced and the sad Haiti of today.  I also want to re-read the few pages on Cuba, now that the possibility of opening up travel between the U.S and Cuba has my mind wandering in that direction. Fermor is always worth rereading.

As usual, if you want to share with others, I urge you to click on Facebook, Digg, Delcious, Stumble or the other symbols below. Tell your friends on Twitter, too.

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