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It used to be that just about every advance in technology was accompanied by someone deciding to take it around the world — bikes, cars, balloons, boats, you name it. Maybe it’s technology that’s changed, maybe it’s us, in either case the round the world trip has become a touch routine by yesterday’s standards.
Sure you could grab an iPad and jump on a plane, but you’re not going to impress anyone. Not like you would if you hopped on a bike in 1892 and road it all the way across America, Europe and Asia.
Which is exactly what several adventurers did when the bicycle was first taking the world by storm.
Next time you’re feeling like the world is small place, just grab a bike and set out for the far side of the globe. Mostly likely the world will start seeming rather large before you get out of town.
Riding your bike around the world today is still an impressive feat, riding one of the first bikes around the world — the world of 1892 — is something only a handful of people ever attempted.
Those early pioneers — both of the bicycle and of extended backpacker-style travel — are the subject of the new book from David Herlihy who previously wrote, Bicycle: a History.
For his latest book, The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance, Herlihy takes on the mystery of what happened to Frank Lenz, one of the first men to attempt an around the world trip by bicycle.
In 1892, Lenz set off from Pittsburgh on what was then the very innovative “safety” bicycle (a prototype of the modern bicycle design, the first with two equal-size wheels) in a quest to cycle around the world. Lenz first crosses the U.S., then hops a ship to Japan which he rides across. From there Lenz crosses China, India and much of the middle east before disappearing two years later in Turkey under what might be called “mysterious circumstances.”
That he made it as far as Turkey is impressive enough. Forget the physical stamina required for the trip, much of areas Lenz crossed didn’t even have roads. Although he wasn’t always riding his bike Lenz does make a dogged effort to cross every mile under his own power.
Until a fateful day in Turkey when he simply dropped off the face of the earth. Eventually Herlihy largely answers the question of what happened to Lenz, though the exact details have been lost to history.
In the end The Lost Cyclist isn’t just about Lenz, but also another pair of round the world cyclists — Thomas Allen and William Sachtleben — and their quest to find Lenz. Allen and Sachtleben actually completed their trip before Lenz (they went in the opposite direction, from London riding east). When Lenz disappeared it was William Sachtleben who went looking for him (you can see the New York Times 1895 write up)
Working from the diaries of Allen, Sachtleben and Lenz, as well as letters from Lenz to various friends and family back in the U.S., Herlihy manages to reconstruct a fascinating yarn that is equal parts adventure story, travel narrative and historical document.
The diary reconstructions will be of particular interest to those who’ve ever wondered what Japan, China and India looked like to an outsider circa 1892.
And if you think dealing with international regulations and bureaucracy is hassle for today’s traveler, the last third of The Lost Cyclist should make you feel better. William Sachtleben, who eventually attempts to track down Lenz and bring his body back to the U.S., faces an endless series of frustrations and horror — from an uncooperative U.S. State Department to the Turkish civil war and even the first Armenian genocide.
Suffice to say that The Lost Cyclist deserves a spot on the traveler’s bookshelf (or on their iPad if you prefer) and makes for an inspiring read. In fact, ever since I finished it I’ve been eyeing the bicycle sitting in the corner of my office thinking, I wonder if anyone has ridden from Gnome to Tierra del Fuego?
Answer: Of course they have (see AntiCompass, for one) but why not another?
In the mean time, The Lost Cyclist will be available June 18, 2010. You can pre-order a copy on Amazon.
Illustration: Azby Brown
The news is full these days about a “green revolution.” Is it really the wave of the future? Or is it actually a return to the past, when living in harmony with the environment was standard practice?
The Tokyo expat magazine Metropolis published excerpts from a new work titled Just Enough: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional Japan.
Author Azby Brown also produced dazzling drawings of rural life in Japan, from houses to ordinary people. It causes one to pause and reflect on how our quest for modernity has caused us to lose our connection to the world.
Have you seen traditional practices abroad that could be used for green living at home? Please share in the comments.
Masaya National Park, Nicaragua
Some things in life frustrate me. Take, for instance, how small the travel sections of most bookstores are, and how narrowly the genre is defined.
I’m aware that narrow definitions are helpful and even necessary, not least when organizing a bookstore. But there’s a danger in this too, especially when we let these sometimes rigid categorizations take too firm a root in our minds. Travel, after all, isn’t just the act of transporting ourselves bodily from one geographic point to another; it also includes the movement of our emotions, spirit, and thought. One who has not learned to move well internally may not be so well equipped to move externally.
One of my favorite books is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. It is a literary classic, not a travel book, but yet—well, I’m going to call it a travel book anyway. Others can provide a good summary of the work, but suffice it to say that Kurt Vonnegut had one of his characters in Slaughterhouse-Five say, “everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov.”
One of my first published pieces in the Christian Science Monitor revolved around me taking the book to Egypt and reading it there. I also have potent memories of reading a few pages while sitting in a hostel in Jerusalem, hours after walking past the wreckage of a suicide bombing that happened earlier in the day. Even though I no longer carry the book with me now, I still, when least expected, recall certain passages. In the photo above, for example, taken at Masaya Volcano National Park in Nicaragua, I had just finished a long, sweltering hike and was taking a break on a crater’s rim. I saw these vultures and thought of the following:
My brother, a dying youth, asked the birds to forgive him. That may sound absurd, but when you think of it, it makes sense. For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world. It may be madness to beg the birds for forgiveness, but things would be easier for the birds, for the child, and for every animal if you were nobler than you are—yes, they would be easier, even if only by a little. Understand that everything is like the ocean. Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too. In a state of fervor you will pray them to forgive you your sins. And you must treasure that fervor, absurd though it may seem to others.
Travel is a broad and beautiful beast, physical and inward, and the bookstore’s travel section can only contain it in part. So travel deeply, to other shelves and distant shores, and don’t at all be afraid if others sometimes think you absurd!
Nomads front page
The Portland-based small publisher Bedouin Books define themselves as “publishers of handmade works of literature and poetry, fiction and non-fiction.” The selective and tiny publishing house began in 2003 and has released a semiannual literary journal (swap/concessions) and several editions of quailty, handbound books, each designed and printed using innovation and artistry.
They have now started a travel imprint, Nomads, featuring new non-fiction work in travel writing, memoir, essays, and philosophy. Got some great stoies you’d like to see in print? Go for the small, creatively artistic publishing company and get some beautiful finished products.
This recent New York Times piece highlights old age as a never-ending adventure, but there are far more desperate, fundamental reasons why elderly people are deciding they’d rather be abroad than at home.
Here are three less-discussed motivations for senior long-term travel (the first two are illustrated below by Lawrence Osborne’s unflinching Bangkok Days):
To escape physical isolation–
He added that what Bangkok offered to the aging human was a culture of complete physicality. It was tactile, humans pressing against each other in healing heat: the massage, the bath, the foot therapy, the handjob, you name it. The physical isolation and sterility of Western life, its physical boredom, was unimaginable.
“There’s a reason we’re so neurotic and violent and unhappy. Especially as we get on a bit, no one ever touches us.”
To erase anonymity –
Farlo seemed to deflate a little. Did he really come here on a regular basis? No one recognized him. But then only money and youth get recognized. At a certain point, complete anonymity overtakes us, and people–not just women–look right through us as if we don’t exist.
We respond with instinctive bitterness to this loss of visibility, but we also recognize the first taste of our future extinction, and we accept it. There will be no reprieve from now on. But Bangkok is a city which in this instance does, after all, offer a brief reprieve. It comes via a simple gesture, which Farlo now executed. The invisible man raises a finger, one could call it the Finger of Assent, which indicates that after long prevarication and weighing up of the available options, he has decided to become financially available for the sexual act. This single gesture suddenly makes the anonymous man highly visible, and within a few seconds he has returned to the field of play upon which his antics, his desires, his neuroses, and his dubious tastes are all once again invested with the vitality, the fraudulent importance, of his youth. He finds himself returned to life, and his detestable anonymity evaporates all around him.
To die with dignity —
George Lundquist, 70, rocks gently in a wicker swing on his 2000 sq. ft. deck in Costa Rica. He looks directly into the webcam and tells us he built this house eight years ago. “I’ve been here ever since. I will never leave.” And he means it. Although he sells real estate to ex-pats, his sincerity is evident. At the end of his 10-minute video, he bares one of the root reasons why Costa Rica is his permanent home:
“I think the quality of death here is better than what you will find in the United States. I feel the doctors here are more involved and interested in my quality of life and my quality of death.”
With two houses already built on a former tobacco plantation (and ready to accommodate his future wheelchair), George isn’t much of a vagabond. He does, however, represent what might be a cousin of medical tourism: end-of-life travel. Not to be confused with the suicide tourism of Switzerland or Mexico, end-of-life travel seeks the ideal conditions and company for one’s final days, months, or years. This might be hospice care in Bangalore, a live-in nurse in Peru, or passing in one’s sleep on a beach in Nicaragua.
These motivations for senior travel are driven by pain, loneliness, and the prospect of a bleak future. They raise difficult questions. What does it say about our society when increasing numbers of our elders find the lifestyle and treatment abroad more desirable and affordable than the options at home?
Further, these motivations can’t be limited to the senior crowd. We younger travelers are quick to deny that we’re running away; we define our motivations as entrepreneurial, adrenaline-addicted, or enlightenment-seeking. But how often are we driven (at least in part) by similar feelings, and when will we start admitting it? If we keep silent about any part of what pushes us from home, how will life at home ever become bearable?
See also: Frank Bures‘ World Hum interview with Lawrence Osborne.
Photo by Stephan Geyer via Flickr.
Selecting 250+ pictures to represent the expanse and wonder of the planet is a daunting task, but it is one that Earth Bound: A Rough Guide to the World in Pictures has done very well.
Best known for its guidebook series, Rough Guides has pulled from a collection of more than 100,000 images to create Earth Bound, released in October 2009. The layout of the book is excellent, with the eye smoothly gliding from page to page (for instance, from the loop of a roller coaster in Madrid to a car traversing the Atacama Desert in Peru). Each image is well supported by insightful and interesting captions (not those scrawny one-liners you sometimes see, but a solid, well-written paragraph). The book is divided into twelve themed chapters, including “People,” “Activities,” “Keepsakes,” and, my favorite, “Transport and Work.”
Earth Bound also employs QR Codes so that you can hold the book in one hand and a mobile phone or some other scanning device in the other in order to pull up a Google map showing the location of each picture. This is indeed innovative in the book world, and I suppose some will enjoy giving it a try.
We have one copy to give away. If you’d like your name included in the pot from which a winner will be randomly selected, all you have to do, in addition to having a U.S. address, is share a brief story about a memorable travel photo. It doesn’t matter whether you or someone else was the photographer; just explain why it left an impression on you. Please leave the story in the comment section by 11:59 p.m. New York time, January 12.
UPDATE: Congrats to DirtyBootz for winning the copy of Earth Bound. Thanks to each of you for sharing your stories.
near Roan Mountain, Tennessee
To be immersed in a foreign world, one doesn’t necessarily need to leave the country. If you’re American, for example, you could go to parts of Miami. Even better, you could take a hike on the Appalachian Trail.
Completed in 1937, the 2175-mile long Appalachian Trail stretches from Georgia to Maine. Many people, myself included, know the trail primarily through day hikes or weekend backpacking excursions. I took the picture above, for instance, in early December while on a day hike with friends in northeast Tennessee.
Others, however, know the trail because they have hiked the whole darned thing. Called thru-hikers, these veterans will attest that all you need to do to enter another world is leave the indoors (which abound in light switches, mattresses, and the occasional swivel chair) and step into the outdoors (which abound in several billion trees and hard sleeping surfaces). Next you will need to step, and step, and—well, you’ll need to keep stepping for a very long time. You are now in foreign territory, on foot and surrounded by trees.
The best known writer to have walked significant swaths of the Appalachian Trail is Bill Bryson. In his book A Walk in the Woods, he describes a trail that cultivates an appreciation for the simple things (”low-level ecstasy,” he calls it). He describes how even a few days on the trail can make stepping through a doorway a disorienting experience and how it enables the taste of white bread to convey you “to the very brink of orgasm.” Some of his most insightful observations concern how one’s worldview shifts when you depend only on your legs for movement. He writes:
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Three to four million people visit the Appalachian Trail each year; only 500 to 600 hike the whole thing. For more information about America’s greatest footpath, including a list of noteworthy thru-hikers (there are some tough 81-year-old men and 8-year-old girls out there), visit the Appalachian Trail Conservancy website. Also, for an account of one thru-hiker’s journey, check out Bryan Kent Gomes’ site; he includes some nice quotes at the head of each week’s entry.
Are you a traveling linguaphile? Many of us that are drawn to travel are also drawn to the study of different languages. Moreover, the seductive accents and quirky slang terms found within our own mother tongue can be endlessly intriguing.
If you can’t leave language alone, Adam Jacob de Boinod’s book The Wonder of Whiffling is certainly for you. The book is a tour of English around the globe. You’ll learn terms for a myriad of random and hysterical things, places, and situations.
Have you told your American friends that you really want to go out and giver this Saturday night? Have you complained that it’s so bloody hot in here? Or told them that your upstairs neighbour is so bloody wide? Have they told you to stop being such a whinger?
The book is bound to have you chortling and winnicking like crazy, and I’m not chippie-burdie-ing you!
After months of travel, if you think you might be crambazzled, ditch your shot-clog and take a break to give de Boinod’s book a read.
It’s once again winter holiday season, which means it’s time to tout my books as stocking stuffers for the travel lovers on your Christmas list. The new twist this year is that you can order signed copies of either book from me directly — just send an email to books [at] rolfpotts [dot] com for details.
Vagabonding makes a great holiday gift for:
And of course my latest book, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, is not just an entertaining and engrossing read for the armchair traveler; its “commentary track” makes it an offbeat travel-writing textbook for students and fans of the genre.
To pick up signed copies of Vagabonding or Marco Polo Didn’t Go There as stocking-stuffers, send an email to books [at] rolfpotts [dot] com. You can also hit your local bookstore, or try the follow the online links I’ve set up here:
In Surviving Paradise, author Peter Rudiak-Gould recounts his year as a volunteer English teacher for WorldTeach on the South Pacific island of Ujae. Part of the Ujae Atoll in the Marshall Islands and measuring only one third of a square mile in area, Peter circumnavigated his new island home before lunch on his first day.
Fresh out of college and hoping to find a remote paradise, to be a big fish in a small lagoon (actually, not that small, being 72 square miles), it’s not your typical coming-of-age story. He very quickly realized that paradise is an ideal that doesn’t always match reality. While still idyllically beautiful and warm, there were also barking dogs, unruly children, loud music, bland food, and bugs galore. This latter point can best be summarized through a local song;
“Bunniin bunun naam, bunniin bunun naam,
Iban kiki, bwe eju naam ekkan niin”
Translated, this means;
“There are zillions of mosquitoes tonight,
there are zillions of mosquitoes tonight,
I can’t sleep, because there are ludicrous numbers
of mosquitoes and their teeth are sharp.”
Throughout the book we learn along with Peter as he unravels more of this unique language which has 11 words for coconut, 35 words for wind, and where there are both words that have very specific meanings such as dentak (striking needlefish with a long piece of wood as they float on the surface of the water on moonlit nights), as well as words with multiple meanings like yokwe eok, which is used for “hello”, “goodbye”, “I love you”, and “I’m sorry for you.”
He comes face-to-face with his own Western identity as he struggles to understand and accept Marshallese values of kindness, generosity, communalism, conflict avoidance, stoicism, conservatism, strict social roles, idolization of the old, and the marginalization of the young. The overriding rule of the land is to maintain harmony at any cost, which includes suppressing emotions and ignoring the grave importance of suicide and the effects of global warming.
The book is a captivating journey, offering vivid descriptions of life on a small Pacific atoll with insights on how a remote island nation deals with the inevitable influence of the Western world. You can also read Rolf’s interview with Peter Rudiak-Gould as this month’s featured writer.
