“The sheer horror of September 11 also conceals an important fact: By most measures, Islamic fundamentalism is the weakest of all the threats that globalization has yet faced. Socialism, the main ideological opponent of liberalism for most of the past century, combined a searing analysis of contemporary injustices with a compelling promise of a better future. Whatever its defects, Marxism spoke to the genuine discontents of millions of workers. It also attracted some of the finest minds in the West — particularly during the dark days of the 1930s when capitalism was plagued by depression and unemployment. Half a century ago communism held sway over at least a sixth of the world

Deep in the pages of Vagabonding, you’ll discover that I advise readers to avoid fast food and packaged meals on the road. “Brave the open-air food markets,” I implore, “and be healthier for the experience!” This is solid road advice (and the word for “market” is good to memorize in any local language), but I didn’t always follow it back when I was actually writing Vagabonding. This is because my apartment sat just a block away from the EZ Supermarket, which dispensed Western specialties like wheat bread, peanut butter, canned tuna, lunchmeat, processed cheese, and breakfast cereal. Since a cyclo fruit vendor came by my pad in the evenings (and since there are some great, cheap restaurants in the area), I found that I could make my writing day more efficient if I just stuck to the food that was available in my neighborhood, rather than heading to the market in the center of town.

In the time since I’ve finished my book, however, EZ Supermarket has gradually stopped stocking Western food. I bought their last jar of peanut butter three weeks ago, and — despite my doleful looks — they don’t plan on ordering more. Hence, my weekly trips to the market in the #2 songthaew (a type of converted truck that functions as a bus) have spiced up both my diet and my experience of my adopted Thai hometown. I’ve found a fried-chicken vendor in the center of the market who puts Colonel Sanders to shame; I take home big bags of locally grown cashews for pennies; mangoes, longan, and papayas now line my pantry. The fruit ladies know me by name, and I’ve even found a Chinese pharmacy that sells trucker hats. Granted, I lose an hour or two of writing time in the process of wandering around the market each week, but it’s worth it.

And, moreover, I’ve found I don’t miss the peanut butter one bit.

“Our world harbors an uncharted territory, no longer white spaces on the map but black spaces, erected by political terrorism, defended not by insurmountable chains of mountains and impenetrable jungle, but by dogma, blood-lust and modern weapon technology, all of which are again closing the doors our curiosity had opened.

Occasionally, I get travel questions that are so broad and basic that they can be hard to answer in a brief and simple manner. An example would be this query, from a college student named Lindsey: “My friend and I are planning a trip to Honduras, and we don’t want to do it like typical tourists. How do we go about planning for it? Could you give us a ballpark figure on costs for say a one-month travel period? What is the best way to get around? How do we come across inexpensive places to stay? Are locals usually trustworthy with their advice?”

I could answer all these questions specifically, but the underlying issue here is that Lindsey is in need of some broad general background on independent travel. Every potential traveler starts at this point, and I wrote Vagabonding to help address these very issues. Beyond my book, destination-specific travel guidebooks and Internet travel communities are useful resources for researching a trip. For those who are only just beginning their travel research, I’ll expand a bit on both of these resources.

(more…)

“Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East — to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them — who were above such trifling.”
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

A long-standing debate among travel-lit critics is the issue of perspective: Should travel authors involve themselves as active, changeable characters in their own narratives, or should they record their destinations at arm’s length, avoiding mention of themselves whenever possible? Many critics (especially British ones, it seems) insist that dispassionate objectivity is the proper way to write a travel book — claiming that a writer’s personal involvement in the story only clouds his ability to truly examine the places to which he travels. From a scholarly or journalistic standpoint this approach makes plenty of sense, but it also has an inherent weakness: In the process of ferreting out social, cultural and historical facts, objective travel writers usually fail to communicate the actual experience of travel amidst other cultures. After all, your typical traveler doesn’t spend all his time visiting libraries and arranging interviews — and this is why there will always be a need for travel books that draw us into an author’s personal experience of a place.

A new book that wonderfully evokes the subjective experience of travel is Tanya Shaffer’s Somebody’s Heart is Burning: A Tale of a Woman Wanderer in Africa. Based largely upon a year spent as a volunteer worker in the West African country of Ghana, Shaffer’s stories read more like parables than journalism, gracefully bringing to life that tenuous zone where people of different cultures interact and try to understand one another. Like many veteran volunteers in Africa, Shaffer is a world-weary realist, but she readily admits the desire to be “knocked over the head by a sense of purpose.” She realizes that her work is futile at times, but she hopes it will nonetheless make her a better person. As she describes interactions with the Africans around her, she draws the reader into the simple mysteries that arise when working in an unfamiliar culture: Are the men she meets do-gooders or scam-artists? Is the na

“The entire view of the world that supported the markets’ faith in globalization has melted down.

“When you’re headed out with your happy travel dreams, the guidebook is your magic key, it’s your oracle, where all the answers await. Problem is, the book is the ideal, that marketing image of grass skirts or exotic temples or jungles that stretch on forever. But the world has its own agenda of trains that break down when it’s 120 degrees outside, and goats that vomit on your shoes.”
–Ed Readicker-Henderson, “Why You’re Here Now”, Motionsickness, Nov/Dec 2002

Here’s a novel road-trip concept: According to a recent CNN report, a group of US college students is traveling across America in a converted school bus running on used vegetable oil. In addition to avoiding non-renewable fossil fuels, an advantage of this arrangement is that the vegetable oil can be acquired for free from fast-food restaurants and cafeterias. “They are sure to draw attention,” the article states. “They will be cruising no faster than 55 mph, with ‘Powered by Veggie Oil painted on the back of the bus. And the oil ‘smells a little bit like whatever it was used to fry — sometimes you get onion rings, french fries, chicken patties.’”

Salon featured a nice interview this week with Monty Python vet Michael Palin, who recently completed a new travel documentary about the Sahara. At a time when so little human-interest news is coming out of the Middle East, it was encouraging to hear Palin’s take on his personal interactions within the Muslim world. “When I travel it really comforts me how little actually divides us,” he says. “Of course there is a huge gulf in our material welfare, religious upbringing, and things like that. But things like your family, your house, your children’s education, your hope for the future, are things that throughout the Muslim world they would share very easily with their counterparts in America.”

Elsewhere in the interview, it was nice to hear Palin give his endorsement to the current travel (and travel literature) environment: “It pleases me when I see a few more shelves at the bookstore devoted to travel. It used to be down on the bottom with gardening and erotica. And I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travelers. This is a golden age of travel again. So many more places are available to us now, especially after the collapse of communism.”