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Tearing up the Silk Road: A Modern Journey from China to Istanbul, through Central Asia, Iran and the Caucasus
by Tom Coote
Garnett publishing, 2012 (buy on AMAZON)
With nine weeks on your hands, the last thing you want to do is breeze from Asia to England through the Silk Road and the Caucasus. Trust me: I know what I am saying as I completed a very similar trip in double that time. The sheer vastness of this part of the world would be enough to put such a task under the perspective of “this time, maybe better not”. However, for some determined individuals, being short on time is not necessarily a problem getting in the way to realize life-long dreams.
Tom Coote is one of them. An individual who’s not just content with the personal pride of having completed such an overland odyssey using only public transport, as he also managed to pen his experiences down in Tearing up the Silk Road. The title is explicative enough, as Tom has literally breezed through a lot of ground, still being able to visit the highlights of 8 countries, a couple of which – China and Kazakhstan – are two of the biggest colored drops on every World map. The more we get into the book, and the more we feel the hourglass inexorably passing sand to its bottom. Ancestral sands similar to those the author has felt creeping down his collar as he ventured from the wilds of Xinjiang to the barren deserted expanses of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. (more…)
“Lost really has two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing. There are objects and people that disappear from your sight or knowledge or possession; you lose a bracelet, a friend, the key. You still know where you are. Everything is familiar except that there is one item less, one missing element. Or you get lost, in which case the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. Either way, there is a loss of control. Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.”
I’ve become a Rebecca Solnit fan. I admit it. It started with the opening lines of her beautiful book, Wanderlust, which is a history of walking, it’s spilled over into everything else I can lay eyes on that she’s written.
This particular passage captivates me. Perhaps because it is only in the past couple of years that I have come to appreciate the depth of loss, and the deep importance of embracing the moment of getting lost, towards self discovery, healing, understanding of others and the world around me. I love the imagery: the material peeling away like the molting of a snake, the view from the rear of a rushing train. I was on a train last week, pouring out of the highlands of central Otago and down onto the plain surrounding Dunedin, New Zealand. I stood on the back and watched the world recede, time travel in action. The intersection of loss and lost.
Are these things you think about? Or is it just me?
(Picture credit: Flickr/derekb)
This past weekend I spent a few hours nosing around the travel section at a local bookstore. With nothing much better to do in another steamy Malaysian Sunday afternoon, I got easily attracted by the air-conditioned comfort of the Temple of Vanity (i.e. one of the abundant malls). I went to the bookstore and started thumbing through the latest travel writing on offer, including magazines and a few books.
After less than half hour, I disappointingly moved to the Fiction’s rack looking for improved browsing pleasure.
Why? I give you a few quick reasons:
1. Most travel writers are too self-centered
I do not understand why I should get excited about “traveling” to a place, when on the contrary I am forced to discover it through the biased perspective of writers who postpone their own cultures ahead of others’, and essentially tell stories about themselves, and not their travels.
2. Too much personal detail is irrelevant
Sometimes telling the story of how you clogged a toilet in Beijing when a line of 20 was waiting outside can be fun. Nevertheless, most of the times a good narrative should be about the country you visit, and not the status of its toilets, your messed- up stomach or whatever else related to your bottom.
3. It should not be about the writer, but the others
Ok, you are surprised about some of the local customs and you want to describe your feelings. Perfect. But what do you expect the locals to think when you arrive in your strange clothes, brandishing an expensive camera they possibly have only seen at the movies, and try to “go local”? I wish someone published what they wrote about it.
4. Good travel writing should read like anthropology
For sure, a writer may not be using a travel grant to spend one year nosing deep into the mountains of Pakistan doing research. Still, I believe it should be a writer’s duty to bring the places he writes about to life using thick descriptions of their peoples, environs and traditions. I don’t see this very often, unfortunately.
5. Stereotypes are only OK in small doses
Travel writers often abuse stereotypical views of countries, peoples and places. As much as it can be difficult to get that “different angle”, I would love to see more engaging, thought-provoking descriptions and prose that does not jump to conclusions too fast.
Do you have any other ideas to continue my list of observations? Please comment!
Nancy has done the impossible.
And I don’t mean cycling from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina over three years with twin boys who broke the Guinness World record for youngest persons to cycle the continents. That’s entirely doable, as is clearly evident by their success. The impossible is encapsulating the scope of that epic adventure into a 350 page book and transporting the reader along every inch of the Pan American Highway.
Changing Gears: A Family Odyssey to the End of the World will take you on the adventure of a lifetime and make you fall in love with this family and their adventurous spirit. I can’t do it justice. I can’t sum it up in a way that wouldn’t fall far short of the sweeping landscapes Nancy paints, the hair raising close calls, the big hearted generosity of strangers, the quiet family moments in tents, and on hillsides where the real work of raising kids and crafting an education takes place.
Far from being just another “travel book” this is a dream you can hold in your hands
This book is a lesson in the value of doing hard things, keeping on when the odds are stacked against you and every fiber of your being cries out to just quit, to lay down, to give up, maybe even to have a nervous breakdown, or die. It is a page turning experience that will motivate you to push hard, and then push harder, because at the very end of your world, is the victory. Why do we trade so many things for the ultimate victory? The Vogel’s didn’t, and Nancy is painfully honest about the ups and the downs, the good and the bad, and the mixed bag of emotions that go with eventually getting the thing you want most in the world. I can’t pick a favourite part. I will tell you that I had tears in my eyes before I was through the prologue and a lump in my throat on the very last page. As someone who lives on the fringe of adventure travel with a family I appreciate her honesty; she hasn’t white washed a thing.
Picture credit: Hans Kemp/Burmese Light
Visionary World from Hong Kong is about to release “Burmese Light”, a pictorial travel book assembled by photographer Hans Kemp and travel writer Tom Vater. The project is an attempt to capture the current changing situation of Myanmar, a country that, despite its troubled past, is making waves within travelers, researchers and scholars alike. I decided to ask some questions regarding the project – to hit the streets in May 2013 – to Hans Kemp, who has traveled the country on and off the beaten track and has packed this book with some incredible pictures. They will definitely intrigue and inspire many to follow his Burmese footsteps…
Why did you decide to capture a visual/textual snapshot of Myanmar at this present time?
Hans Kemp – I have been publishing illustrated books for a long time and the idea of doing a book on Myanmar has been there a long time. What made me decide to do it now was a combination of a growing interest in the country and therefore a better economic prospect for a book and the realization that Myanmar could soon be caught in a maelstrom of “progress and destruction” with the loss of old architecture and customs, to make place for high rises and KFC. (more…)
Picture credit: Flickr/ United Nations Photo
When I moved to Asia in 2007, I was still tied under the wheels of the Machine, back home. Everything I was doing, experiencing, and trying to translate into a piece of writing, or any other form of “artistic text”, I did so with the wish that someone, back home, would recognize my efforts and get me that publishing deal I had wished for so much in virtue of my brave choice of moving abroad.
Reality is often different from our dreams. Especially when coming from a culturally under developing nation such as Italy, where trying to be an “artist” is guaranteed to put a very sorry expression across any parental face. Back then, it was with a sense of scorn that I looked at all the rejections, the nos and the maybes, as it dawned on me that, wherever I may have roamed, I was destined to be a total failure.
Still, I put together a blog, I chose the best pieces out of it and edited them for good and self-published an Italian written book on my life as a teacher in small town China. I cannot say it was successful, as it was not. It was just barely ok not to hang the keyboard to the wall, and start playing badminton instead.
It was at that point that I travelled, and travelled, and travelled deeper and wider all across East Asia. When I finally stopped again, as Hank Williams put it “No more darkness, no more night. Now I’m so happy, no sorrow in sight. Praise the Lord, I saw the light …”
Facing the most sacred Buddha statue in the Lama temple of Beijing, China, I bowed down and I expressed my wish. Maybe I was thinking that through such a foreign surrogate I would have reached my own, white-faced version of God. Well, I was wrong. Those Asian ears were indeed openly listening to my call. Slowly – as good things do not happen overnight -, I found out that I had overlooked what was happening around me. Exactly in the place I was living THEN. Developing countries have plenty of opportunities. Otherwise, they would not be called as such, I guess?
Asian publishers are not much different from Western ones, but possibly, they accept submission, and you do not need an agent, or spend too much money on it. It is still a tough process, but at least you will get rejection letters. Sometimes even explaining what is wrong with your stuff. The hard work is still there, the results are, however, greatest in the East. In a single hard working year, I have published more than I ever did in the past 5 or 6, kicked off the road by frustration, rejection, and let me tell it, a great dose of assholism.
My suggestion to all the wannabe writers (and another cite to one of the best movies of all times): when there is no more room in hell, look around wherever you are, and start pitching left and right. Then, your articles and stories will walk the earth.
MARCO FERRARESE explored 50 countries and lives in Penang, Malaysia since 2009. He is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University’s Sunway Campus, Kuala Lumpur, researching the anthropology of punk rock and heavy metal in Southeast Asia. Besides his academic endeavors, he blogs about overland Asian travel and extreme music in Asia at www.monkeyrockworld.com
Eleanor Stanford’s memoir, Historia, Historia: Two Years in the Cape Verde Islands, is out this month from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. Her first book, The Book of Sleep 
How did you get started traveling?
When I graduated from college I joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Cape Verde, West Africa. While I was in the Peace Corps, I visited four of the nine islands that comprise Cape Verde, and Senegal as well. Both living and traveling as a Peace Corps volunteer gave me a clearer understanding of the sort of travel I was interested in doing: that is, not so much traveling, as living in a place long enough to have an inside view of what it was like. The next time I had such an opportunity was ten years later, when my husband and I moved to Salvador, Brazil with our three sons to work at an international school there.
How did you get started writing?
I started writing poetry when I was in college, then immediately after college I joined the Peace Corps, where I continued to write. When I returned to the States, I enrolled in an English Ph.D. program, hated it, and went to get my MFA in creative writing instead.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
Having a poem accepted for publication in Poetry magazine when I was twenty-five. I remember standing on my front porch in Madison, Wisconsin, reading the letter and nearly hyperventilating. The poem later went on to win Poetry’s Union Arts and Civics award, which carried a prize of $1000, no small sum in the world of poetry publication.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
At this point in my life, with three little kids, my biggest challenge is getting out the door.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Finding the time, between family life and teaching obligations. Other than that, the writing itself is always a challenge, in its own frustrating, thrilling, mysterious way.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Finances and promotion. Especially as someone who is primarily a poet, these areas don’t come naturally to me, nor do they seem, to be honest, a natural outgrowth of or corollary to writing. I do promotion as best I can, with a lot of help from more adept friends and family.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
All the time. I’ve been a Peace Corps volunteer, graduate teaching assistant, and high school guidance counselor in Brazil. Now I am an adjunct English and creative writing professor. (All of which are, sadly, only marginally more lucrative than writing.)
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
I’m inspired by journals and biographies of eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers and naturalists: Maria Sibylla Merian in Surinam, Lewis and Clark, Henry Bates in the Amazon, Darwin in Galápagos and my beloved Cape Verde. More recently, Geoff Dyer and John Jeremiah Sullivan. Also, poetry: Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Fernando Pessoa packing his bags for nowhere at all
And, as a much-needed antidote to much travel writing, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place: “You needn’t let that funny feeling you have from time to time about exploitation, oppression, domination develop into full-fledged unease, discomfort; you could ruin your holiday.”
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
From my own experience, I would suggest writing and traveling for the joy of it, and finding another way to support oneself financially. But that’s just me — if you can find a way to make it work otherwise, more power to you.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
The way that each experience, traveling and writing, deepens the other: traveling gives you something compelling to write about, and writing allows you to assimilate and reflect upon your travels in a more meaningful way–and hopefully to share the experience with readers as well.
Matthew Kepnes is the author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day: Travel Cheaper, Longer, Smarter
How did you get started traveling?
I did a tour around Costa Rica in 2003. From that moment on, I was hooked on travel. I couldn’t believe I had waited so long to travel. That trip profoundly changed my life and realizing what I was missing out on, I vowed to do it more often. After that the rest is history.
How did you get started writing?
I wanted to write guidebooks for Lonely Planet so I created my website to be an online resume where they could see my writing and previous work. However, as the site got bigger, I became a walking guidebook in some ways and now my site is all the writing I do.
What do you consider your first “break” as a writer?
I would say it was in 2009 when I was interviewed by the Frugal Traveler column in the New York Times. It was a big event and completely changed everything.
As a traveler and fact/story gatherer, what is your biggest challenge on the road?
As a writer the hardest part is running around gathering all the information you need for an article. I try to be very thorough so much my time is divided between actually enjoying the location and running around getting prices, checking on passes, and finding deals for other travelers. I don’t want to miss anything so my time in new locations is very hectic.
What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?
Managing time. It’s hard to always be traveling and writing at the same time. I can’t be out exploring if I am in my hotel writing but I have nothing to write about if I’m not out exploring.
What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint?
Find a way to bring in consistent revenue. While my blog is monetarily successful, it takes a lot of work to maintain my income level and it’s hard to find ways to bring in the money easily and consistently. It’s often a hustle.
Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?
No, I had another job when I started this website so when the website finally started making money, I just left that job to focus on the blog.
What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?
Bill Bryson is a huge influence. His book In a Sunburned Country
What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?
Be focused. There are plenty of “experts” out there but really the best of them are ones you focus on one area. Travel is too encompassing of a term. You can’t be a “travel expert” but you can be an expert on a type of travel or a destination. Focus on that and you will see much better success.
What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?
Being able to set my own schedule and being my own boss. I get to do what I love (travel) and get paid to do it all while being able to live life at my own pace and on my own schedule.
Photo credit: maxymedia/Flickr
I think it is never too late or too biased to try spending a few words on the travel writing subject, as this still constitutes an activity that many vagabonds fancy to help substantiate their living on the run.
Since I started writing for Vagabonding one year ago, I have more and more delved into the world of the written word; luckily, with very hard work I have made some progresses in terms of getting a series of published paid features under my belt, and currently I am even ironing out a book deal. As long as I am still far from being able to say that I write profitably, my growing portfolio has helped expand my opportunities, tune my ability to deal with busy editors, and generate some extra income – peanuts, mind you – from my personal website.
I fondly remember reading the rules of a travel writing competition somewhere on the internet upon entering Nepal. It read something like this: “If you can confidently say that you make about 40% of your total income by writing about travel, then it means that you ARE a travel writer. But you may still apply to our contest!”
“Great”, I said to myself rocking proudly in my seat, “I am a travel writer now! Wooo-ooo!”
In reality at the time – during my Asia to Europe overland trip, for the best part of year 2012 – my monthly income roughly totaled 250$, a 40% of which coming from article pay and my “travel website” meager revenues. Yeah, I was definitely a travel writer by their standard, but what if I had to be one in Las Cruces New Mexico, instead of Mahendranagar Nepal? The difference would have been weighed in the amount of days I would have been able to stay on the road and feed myself – and my partner, bear in mind! – with that little pocket money. Thank God, the Indian Subcontinent is a very cheap place to live and travel.
Some people told me I was nuts; some other patted me on my back and said I rocked. Me myself, I really thought and still think that I had better found something else to do on the side –and luckily, I have been awarded a PhD scholarship and am now comfortably living in Malaysia with such an allowance, finally making the travel writing “income” a substantial bonus to actually earn some bucks as I fancy the “nomadic lifestyle”.
Based on the above, do we still think that trying travel writing has sense? For how long will we be able to be happy by eating banana pancakes and sleep in roach infested motels just to make ends meet?
Wouldn’t it just be better to have a normal job back home, and take a few months off to travel every year?
I constantly change the answers to all of the above questions depending on my luck and my mood on the day.
In a very explanatory article I recommend, travel writer Tim Leffel put it in a way I like: “Before you fall for it, remember that it is also glamorous to be a rock star, a best-selling novelist, or a starter for the Lakers. It’s not so glamorous, however, to be an aspiring actor (waiter) in Los Angeles, an aspiring songwriter (waiter) in Nashville, or an aspiring novelist (waiter) in New York.”
For the moment, by saying that I do not have to clean up tables and shuttle drinks in New York, but browse books in Kuala Lumpur as I write on the side, it’s already been quite an accomplishment. For the rest, I guess that what is really moving me forward along this way is the fun of it. And not last, the really depressing, over generalizing quality of most of the “travel writing” content I see around the newsstands’ racks these days.
If any of you have any other worthwhile suggestions or considerations to add, please comment below.
By Tom Vater – published by Crimewave Press, 2012
A bunch of hippies, a rattler of a bus and the adventure of a lifetime along freely open South Asian land borders in the mid 70s are the base ingredients of “The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu”, Tom Vater’s first novel, originally released in 2006 and newly available now. Add and blend in a scary amount of drug abuse, corrupted border officials and a drug smuggling deal gone bad in the Pakistani mountains of the Swat valley, and you can complete this lethal Molotov cocktail of a book. To my knowledge, one of the few pulp adventures set in the Hippy Trail’s background, if not the first.
The plot is precisely knit as a handmade, intricate Kashmiri carpet: the events unfold between a lysergic trippin’ past in 1976 and present day Kathmandu, where the surviving units of the wild bunch have reunited to piece together the last fragments of a puzzle scattered across much more than just time.
When a mysterious email lands in Dan’s inbox, a story which may have stayed buried under the Himalayan snows comes back to life, rippin’ and taking hostages like a terrorist attack. And it is rendezvous’ time, adding young Robbie, Dan’s son who finds himself in Kathmandu at the same time, looking for his own version of Asia. The plethora of gangsters, guns, women and holy men coming in the middle will just help to make it a dangerous one.
Tom Vater, travel writer and expert of the region, mixes a fondness for Asian travel with a deep appreciation for noir and crime fiction, painting a vivid portrait of a Thamel-haunted Kathmandu and its dwellers. If you ever visited the Nepali capital, you may easily get lost in the abounding topographic details scattered all over the novel. Its characters get slowly uncovered, pieced together with 25 years old tape, showing that for some not much has changed between now and then. Inevitably, the gathering becomes housekeeping time for restless souls and bank accounts, respectively.
“The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu” successfully depicts an odd world of lawless Western abuse against the magical backdrop of Asia’s southern roads; at the end, it is difficult to discern who plays worst between strung-out travelers and strange locals. One thing is certain, tough: it is a ride you won’t likely put down until this book is finished. A noteworthy addition to your travel literature.
