Nomad vagabond

So I went and read this – on a flight between San Francisco and Denver following a long transpacific jaunt. I’d already talked about it here, (correction: earlier LPs were innocent in the way that they were less corporate and were targeting a different audience) and had a brief exchange with Smitty @ 2theBigMango about it as well. In what I have read about it so far, the reviewers’ focus was on the author’s morality as a writer (or lack thereof). But I related to the book on a completely different level. Anyone who has traveled independently will know the exhilaration: the exoticism, the beaches, the foreign languages, the smells, the dope, the alcohol, the girls.

It is like being in the Duran Duran ‘Rio’ ‘Hungry like the wolf’ video. It is a highly condensed, high impact, adrenaline rush: adventure and discovery in one; and if you are fortunate enough to stay at a five star facility, all of the above will come at a level of luxury you cannot imagine if you are just an average Joe in the West.

TK does a good job describing some of the downsides (the loneliness, to which I allude in a previous post where I’m talking about the structure that you need to have in place as a traveler, the reliance on the ‘kindness of strangers’ that Paul Theroux also mentions) and dilemmas encountered: I think every ‘privileged’ traveler has indeed had to juggle some pretty heavy moral issues in some circumstances.

It was good to read a book that deals with the process of writing a ‘travel’ book – and in many ways, books like ‘The beach’ are travel books too: its like being there in Thailand with Alex Garland when did what he did that caused him to write about it. And speaking of ‘The beach’, it was nice to see that TK has the same opinion about it as me (mentioned in a previous post).