World Hum’s, countdown of the top-30 travel books of all time finishes today. Late last week, I reviewed Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu (#8), of which I wrote:

A collection of eleven essays chronicling the cultural fusion of East and West in the 1980s, Iyer’s literary debut is an answer to all those critics who claim that great travel writing died once the terra incognita was mapped. As this Asia-themed collection shows, the final frontier of adventure isn’t located on some distant mountain or impenetrable jungle, but in the intimate (and often comical) cross-cultural fascinations and discoveries that arise from an ever-shrinking world.

Amid his sharp reportage and analysis, Video Night in Kathmandu‘s greatest strength is Iyer’s refusal to draw prim moral conclusions as Western popular culture bumps up against the traditions of the East. Instead, he casts things in terms of a tenuous romance. “When Westerner meets Easterner,” Iyer writes, “each finds himself often drawn to the other, yet mystified; each projects his romantic hopes on the stranger, as well as his designs; and each pursues both his illusions and his vested interests with a curious mix of innocence and calculation that shifts with every step.” Moreover, the author’s eye for ironic juxtapositions—Rambo-inspired musicals in India, baseball fever in Japan, Mowhawk haircuts in Bali—proves so keen that he practically inaugurates the now-common “cultural-contradiction” travel-story template. Even if the specific cross-cultural obsessions of “Video Night” (Michael Jackson, Rambo) seem a bit dated, the ensuing rise of globalization and reach of the Internet have only underscored how relevant Iyer’s observations were.

The full index of World Hum’s Top 30 travel books can be found here. If you disagree with the World Hum list, or have your own suggestions for a travel book worthy of Top 30 consideration, post at the World Hum forum, or send them an email and let them know what you think!

This week in my Yahoo! News travel column, I field a travel question from Stefanie in Bremerton, who asks:

I am planning a trip to Europe for an undetermined amount of time. Should I bring my cell phone for emergencies? What is the protocol on that?

Bringing a cell phone from the U.S. on a European journey, I tell her, is never a sure bet, since most U.S. phones aren’t compatible with European cellular networks. If you want to have a cell phone during your trip, your best option is probably just to buy one when you arrive in Europe. But before buying a cell phone, I’d consider not using a cell phone at all while in Europe, since being “connected” is sometimes a distraction when you are earnestly trying to experience new countries.

For my full advice on this topic, including advice on buying a cell phone in Europe, click through to my latest “Traveling Light” column here.

It’s been awhile since I’ve shared any of the weird words from Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo, so — for travelers looking to wow (or just confuse) their international hosts — here are a few choice global vocabularly nuggets:

• The Dutch word for skimming stones is plimpplamppletteren.
• Nakhur is Persian for a camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled.
• Cigerci is Turkish for a seller of liver and lungs.
• Madogiwazoku is Japanese for “window gazers” (i.e., office workers who sit at desks with little to do).
• Seigneur-terrasse is French for a person who spends much time but little money in a café.
• Tsuji-giri is Japanese for trying out a new sword on a passer-by (an example of the lack of respect for peasants by the Samurai).
• Torschlusspanik is German the fear of diminishing opportunities as one gets older.

World Hum’s, (somewhat subjective) countdown of the top-30 travel books of all time has now entered the top ten. Earlier this week, I reviewed Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard (#11), of which I write:

Matthiessen’s Zen-flavored masterpiece is as much a classic of nature and spiritual literature as it is of travel writing. Documenting a 1973 journey into the remote Dolpo region of Nepal, Matthiessen officially sets out to help zoologist George Schaller study Himalayan blue sheep. As he takes the reader deep into the mountains, however, we realize that Matthiessen is using this scientific journey as a metaphor to reflect on much broader matters of life, death and existence itself.

The famous irony of The Snow Leopard is that Matthiessen never spots the elusive creature during his adventure. Thus, robbed of the climactic moment, the author leads us into the simple essence of his journey: “the common miracles—the murmur of my friends at evening, the clayfires of smudgy juniper, the coarse, dull food, the hardship and simplicity, the contentment of doing one thing at a time: when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do.” In this way, the spiritual lessons of this book aren’t relegated to romantic abstractions or heady epiphanies, but to a gentle reminder that life consists of what each moment brings us; that it’s futile to obsess on the workings of the past and future if you’re missing out on experience of the present moment.

An index of the Top 30 travel books (updated daily) can be found here.

My latest Traveling Light column at Yahoo! News, You Have Now Entered the Tourist Zone, relates the story of how a curious experience in India led me to consider how the presence of travelers changes the way locals act:

On the surface, Pushkar didn’t seem much like a Tourist Zone: There were no glitzy hotels, no air-conditioned knickknack boutiques, no busloads of sunburned Germans and chubby Texans. Moreover, had you surveyed Pushkar’s visitors, you would have mainly found independent travelers — young wanderers from Europe and North America and Israel, who shunned guided tours and took a genuine interest in Hindu culture.

Still, despite the earnestness of its travelers, Pushkar was very much a Tourist Zone — place that had subtly shifted to cater to the needs of its visitors. Only instead of churning out the standard tourist products (postcards, audio tours, spa treatments), Pushkar had developed a makeshift economy in Hindu “authenticity” (exotically dressed sadhus, quick-fix puja rituals, high-turnover yoga ashrams). After several years of popularity on the backpacker circuit, the residents of Pushkar hadn’t gotten greedy; they’d merely become adept at packaging all of the Indian symbols and rituals that indie travelers found whimsically attractive (as well as a few choice Western amenities, like familiar-sounding food and Internet cafés).

The full story of my Pushkar experience — including tips on how to best operate within tourist zones — can be found here.

“While lamenting the passage of heroic explorers, [Paul] Fussell also decries what he imagines to be the homogenization of the world, the way in which whole cities and previously remote regions have become interchangeable and safe for Mom and Dad and Buddy and Sis. He argues that airport design has become a “ubiquitous international idiom.” He jokes that “the closest one could approach an experience of travel in the old sense today would be to drive in an aged automobile with doubtful tires through Romania or Afghanistan without hotel reservations and to get by on terrible French.” * To which I can only reply, Mr. Fussell really should get out more. […] Whole nations in Africa, and Latin and South America…are largely unknown, seldom visited, extraordinarily uncomfortable and every bit as threatening as the Danikil Desert was when Wilfred Thesiger crossed it in the 1930s. Airplanes, CNN, and the Internet may offer the illusion that nowhere in the world is unreachable, unexplored or unexamined. Yet for ten years Algeria might have been the dark side of the moon, and the savagery between an unelected government and Islamic terrorists turned that country into a Heart of Darkness in which tens of thousands of people were killed just an hour’s flight from Rome or Nice.”
–Michael Mewshaw, “Travel, Travel Writing, and the Literature of Travel” (2004)

A couple months ago, I read in Tim Leffel’s blog that author Taras Grescoe has pointed out that supporting a pack-a-day cigarette habit in New York City for a year costs as much as a round-the-world plane ticket:

At $7.50 a pack, a common price in New York, the tab after 365 days would be $2,737.50. That’s not just enough for a bare bones round-the-world ticket; it’s actually enough for one with a fair number of stops.

If you take that reasoning a step further, quitting smoking for two years and putting that $7.50 per day away in the bank would result in a plane ticket and enough to fund three to six months of travel in cheap countries. I’m not picking on smokers really. They get enough abuse. Apply the same reasoning to those with a two-a-day mocha latte habit, or to those who can’t stop buying new shoes, people who spend hundreds of dollars a week at restaurants, or anyone who feels they have to have the latest hot sports car in the driveway. Unless you’re really making close to nothing, budgeting is all about priorities. You pay the fixed costs and then divvy up the rest according to priorities. In too many cases, the priorities revolve around buying and consuming at a frenetic pace, or purchasing short vacation packages in the same way a shopper would purchase a new TV.

The people who most often ask how I can afford to travel so often are usually earning more money than I do. The problem is, it’s all going into their new car, their ever-growing wardrobe, and their oversized house filled with too much stuff.

Those who really want to travel do. I’ve shared guesthouses with school teachers, janitors, bartenders, and construction workers. They made travel a priority, saved their money, and took off. For most of us, it’s simply a matter of will.

Leffel’s full blog entry on this topic can be found here.

“”When I first lived in China, I was mostly struck by the differences, but over time the similarities became more obvious. Americans and Chinese shared a number of characteristics: they were pragmatic and informal, and they had an easy sense of humor. In both nations, people tended to be optimistic, sometimes to a fault. They worked hard — business success came naturally, and so did materialism. They were deeply patriotic, but it was a patriotism based on faith rather than experience: relatively few people had spent much time abroad, but they still loved their country deeply. When they did leave, they tended to be bad travelers — quick to complain, slow to adjust. Their first question about a foreign country was usually: What do they think of us? Both China and the United States were geographically isolated, and their cultures were so powerful that it was hard for people to imagine their perspectives.

“But each nation held together remarkably well. They encompassed a huge range of territory, ethnic groups, and languages, and no strictly military or political force could have achieved this for long. Instead, certain ideas brought people together. When Han Chinese talked about culture and history, it reminded me of the way Americans talked about democracy and freedom. These were fundamental values, but they also had some quality of faith, because if you actually investigated — if you poked around an archaeological site in Gansu, or an election in Florida — then you saw the element of disorder that lay just below the surface. Some of the power of each nation was narrative: they smoothed over the irregularities, creating good stories about themselves.”

–Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones (2006)

This week at Traveling Light, I review Peter Hessler’s new China book Oracle Bones, and pose a few Asia travel questions to the author.

In Oracle Bones, Hessler (who I first interviewed in 2002) readily admits that China is a huge topic to tackle, and makes the apt observation that orthodox news journalism tends to focus on problems in the region — and hence miss the real story. Hessler expands on this issue in the Q&A:

A correspondent who writes about a famine in Africa can save lives. But China is a very different place: it’s stable, functioning, independent, and increasingly powerful. There’s a limit to what Americans can do there, and more importantly, the U.S. doesn’t need to do very much. China has been steadily improving the lives of the vast majority of its citizens for twenty years, under its own governance. When Americans look across the Pacific, the central question isn’t how they can change China, but how they can understand the people who live there. Again, context is the key. Americans need a better sense of how the average Chinese lives and thinks. I know that this is often frightening to Americans — the sense that they can’t do much to help the Chinese. Personally, I find this to be a relief. Given how difficult it’s proven to fix up relatively small countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans should be grateful that they aren’t responsible for the welfare of 1.3 billion Chinese.

In this sense, China is a unique place, and our media hasn’t quite figured out how to respond. There have always been standard ways of covering foreign countries, and foreign correspondents generally bounce from one place to another. It might be time to rethink this strategy. As we learn more about the outside world, we realize that different countries should be covered differently, and it makes sense to find specialists people who speak the language and are willing to spend more time on the ground.

I want to emphasize that I’m not saying that everything in China is good, and my opinion isn’t based on a desire to “help” China or show the country in a strictly positive light. I’m an apolitical person; I see myself as an observer, not an activist. I have no patience for either Chinese or American nationalism, and I believe that both countries have serious trouble understanding and interacting with the rest of the world. My experiences as a teacher showed me how damaging it is to give people a warped view of a faraway place. It disgusted me to see Americans depicted in extreme terms, and I react the same way to inaccurate portraits of Chinese.

The full book review and Hessler interview, entitled “A Literary Window on China,” can be found here.

Over at World Hum, the (somewhat subjective) countdown of the top-30 travel books of all time continues. My latest contributions to the roundup include Tony Horwitz’s Baghdad Without a Map (#26), and Tim Cahill’s Road Fever (#21).

Of Road Fever, I write:

A founding editor of Outside magazine, Cahill has been credited with revitalizing adventure writing—a genre that had previously been confined to breathless, semi-fictional tales of danger in the pages of low-culture men’s magazines. The tongue-in-cheek titles of Cahill’s early essay collections—“Jaguars Ripped My Flesh”; “A Wolverine is Eating My Leg”; “Pecked to Death by Ducks”—are a nod to his pulpy precursors, but his writing is the opposite of pulp: informed, nuanced, self-deprecating, and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.

Road Fever, Cahill’s only book-length travel narrative, chronicles a 15,000-mile dash to set a world record by driving overland across the Americas in less than 24 days. In many ways, it’s an anti-adventure book, since a large portion of the tale documents the process of making plans and procuring corporate sponsorship—but this says a lot about the competitive, publicity-driven, and weirdly postmodern state of post-Exploration Age adventure. The author’s partner in the journey is professional endurance driver Gary Sowerby, and together the duo deal with fatigue, dangerous roads, stubborn bureaucrats—and an overabundance of sponsor-supplied pudding—as they race north into the pages of the “Guinness Book of World Records.” As the miles speed by, Cahill’s exuberant reporting and eye for the absurd make for an amusing and exhilarating ride.

An index of the Top 30 travel books (updated daily) can be found here.