I first got the travel bug on my 10th birthday when my best friends and I went to see Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. I was smitten and not just with Cliff. To buy a big bus and you and all of your friends head off to Greece! Or anywhere for that matter. My girlfriend’s playhouse became a bus and then in my late teens I was off to the UK. I met Mr Bishi in London and we started our travelling in a VW Beetle with tent and gear in the back for our grand European tour honeymoon.
A little older, more responsible, widely travelled and back in NZ, getting away is just that bit more expensive, but I hanker after visiting favourite places and seeing new ones. What to do? No brainer really: live vicariously through travel books, the quirkier the better.
Brian Thacker is Australian and it shows in his style of writing (humourous and irreverent) and his continual wearing of shorts. Using Couchsurfing.com, GlobalFreeloaders.com etc., Brian is travelling on the smell of the traditional mechanic’s wiping cloth. He’s bed testing/couch surfing to Reykjavik, Istanbul, Kitchener, Rio, places he’s never been. In fact you might say he’s been Sleeping Around, opens a new window.
His potential hosts he chooses carefully. A lot of profiles mention their desire for guests to use the loo instead of the bathroom floor and generally that they like to party and drink copiously. No-one boring – the more outlandish the better. His liver takes a bashing and he lacks sleep, but he certainly sees places through different eyes. No longer a tourist but a friend of a local. Ideal.
Like a lot of people I have “Take canal boat through canals of UK” on my secondary bucket list. Being secondary, there is little hope of this happening. This makes the stories from Terry Darlington featuring wife Monica, Jim the cowardly thieving whippet who hates boating, and their English canal boat Phyllis May all the more fun.
Together we’ve been across the English Channel (a first for a narrow boat) and down to the Med and along an Indian River in the south of the good ole US in Narrow Dog to Indian River, opens a new window and I joined them in their earlier journeys around the UK in Narrow Dog to Wigan Pier. Darlington’s writing is funny and I’ve been transported to some beautiful places (some with insects that bring to mind small aircraft), have met the “gongoozlers” on the towpaths, and have visited the pubs where Jim scoffs pork scratchings.
But it was Dervla Murphy, opens a new window who got us attempting to cycle from the UK to Australia*. She is modest, fearless, tough, funny, extremely fond of beer and my hero. At the age of 30-something, she headed off on her bike from Ireland to Nepal. She made it and having a social conscience she stayed and worked in the refugee camps. Once she got a taste for travel she was soon off again and over the years has cycled, ridden or walked – whatever works for the terrain (but never used motor transport if she can help it). When her daughter was barely old enough, Rachel adventured with her mother to India, Cameroon, Baltistan and beyond.
She is a personable woman and it comes through in her writing. I admire Dervla hugely; she is a very brave woman and brilliant travel writer.
Not forgetting the library’s own Armchair Travel Newsletter, opens a new window which brings us new and recently released titles. I’ll end up anchored to my armchair in the Spring sunshine in Christchurch, but in my head I’ll be enjoying some of these new titles that I have already reserved.
Do you travel dangerously, wittily and vicariously? Admire writers for their get up and go and the ability to string the words together in an interesting fashion? Use their books as a guide for your own travels?
*We left the tandem in Iran due to a severe shortage of money and made it to Australia with $3 to our name.
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