Ron McMillan's Blog
Inspirations Past
Recent days have been brightened by the renewal of email dialogue with Paul S., an old friend and fellow-wanderer who, it must be said, could talk the hinds legs off the proverbial beast of burden – but with whom I have always enjoyed blethering about books in particular. When I first met him more than 25 years ago, it was somehow prophetic that the encounter took place in a library in downtown Seoul. Paul is a man who, if you dropped him in the middle of the Gobi Desert, bound, gagged and tied in a sack, would make a friend inside five minutes. So I was taken aback by the unabashed chattiness of the tall Englishman with the giant uncontrollable flap of fringe he kept scooping sideways and back from eyes that engaged me studiously throughout a conversation that immediately took on the grip and tenor of a talk with an old friend.
Memories from another continent in another lifetime have a tendency to shrink and distort time, but not too long after that first encounter, we discovered a shared love of travel writing and a common dream of one day taking on the all-too daunting (for me) notion of blue-water trans-ocean sailing. (Paul went on to realise that dream, recently single-handing across the Atlantic, a trip involving a stretch of sail-driven solitude lasting 26 long days, and that I look forward to hearing about in a monologue that may take the loquacious Paul almost as long to relate).
But back to Seoul, circa 1984. Paul introduced me to the books of an irascible Welsh travel author called Tristan Jones, and in particular to his unlikely oceanic adventure, The Incredible Voyage – A Personal Odyssey. With the benefit of a couple of decades’ consumption of travel writing of all stripes, I recognise now that Jones’s books always had the whiff of the unbelievable about them. They fizzed with a blustery, over-opinionated prose style that perhaps owed something to both the Boys Own School of Adventure Writing and to the London Times Letters Page School of Whingeing.
The Incredible Voyage told of a six-year sea trip undertaken with the ambitious goal of sailing on both the world’s lowest and highest bodies of waters: the Dead Sea and Lake Titicaca. The former presented challenges enough, situated as it was in the middle of a 1970s war zone, but the book really grew legs when its second stanza saw Jones journey right around (and across, yes across) South America aboard, alongside and sometimes apparently in front of a sturdy wee wooden yacht called, I seem to remember, Sea Dart. He did this after smuggling the boat across Peru by truck and up the Andes to Lake Titicaca – then embarking on an explorer’s quest all the way down jungle tributaries through Paraguay and Argentina to the mighty Amazon and out into the south Atlantic, an adventure described in thundering, frothing, sometimes pant-clenchingly grimy detail.
I got thinking about Jones today when I came across a Guardian list of ‘top ten travel books’. Unsurprisingly, Jones does not feature anywhere on the list, though I am placated by finding my own all-time favourite, Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, occupying its rightful spot at Number One.
A Wikipedia page on Tristan Jones that shatters some of my naïve illusions about his past (much of which he seemingly invented, as he did large sections of his travel adventures), can be found here.
The Incredible Voyage remains in stock at Amazon.
Jones died in Thailand in 1995. According to this account, he was by then not only penniless, but friendless as well.
Imagine the ridiculous task of trying to whittle down the world’s best travel books to ten. And then imagine my surprise at not having heard of (despite owning an enormous collection of travel books) the majority of the selections ... time to get busy propping up the book publishing industry!
By Roberto on Friday 7th August 2009 at 9:52pm
I agree about the ridiculousness of such ‘top ten’ lists. But it is that time of year for the newspapers, when they struggle to fill pages and so often take the easy ‘let’s talk about summer reading’ way out.
Nor had I heard of eight out of ten of the books, though several of the authors were on my radar, and might just benefit from this piece of marketing, so perhaps the column is already in the black…
By Ron McMillan on Friday 7th August 2009 at 10:24pm
Methinks your view of top 10 lists will change when you get on one.
Meanwhile, one suspects these all-time-favourite-travel-reads are more their all-time-serve-up-some-obscure-and-interesting books. Which is fine - do we really need to be pointed to Paul Theroux or Jan Morris anymore?
By Moustafa Begun on Friday 7th August 2009 at 10:36pm
Cosmic Convergence may be overstating the case, but anyhow a remarkable coincidence that you should mention Eric Newby’s “Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” just three days after I finished reading (sitting on a beach in the Redneck Riviera, as it happens)another book by Newby, “Love and War in the Appennines.”
I’d been aware of the book through dozens of laudatory references over the years from people whose reading tastes I respect, but somehow never got around to reading it until a copy leaped into my hands from the Dollar Remainder bin of a local bookstore last week.
Although not, strictly speaking, a travel book (then again, I suppose that an escaped POW scrambling through the forests south of the Po river in war-time Italy, trying to elude Nazi soldiers and Fascist milizia IS engaged in a kind of travel), it’s a simply marvelous piece of writing, vastly deserving the recommendation that this coincidence and your blog have inspired and enabled.
But back to your first meeting with Paul at `a library in downtown Seoul.’ In trying to picture it, I’m thinking that, given the absence of local libraries there, it would have had to have been either the British Council library on Sejong-ro, or the United States Information Service library, in Myeongdong, at Eulgiro 1-ga, across from the main entrance of the Lotte Hotel.
I’m guessing it was the former, but knowing your fondness for being around scenes of violent political confrontation, it just might have been the USIS library, which (you can’t have forgotten) was seized and occupied in May 1985 by students demanding a public apology from the U.S. for the Gwangju Massacre and an end to support for Chun Doo-hwan. As I recall it was seized again in 1989 and firebombed in 1990.
D.avid
Memory Lane
By David Kosofsky on Friday 7th August 2009 at 11:26pm
Hello David,
Your first guess is of course correct - British Council library, a place I spent a lot of time in, as did Paul. Strangely enough, I never did visit the USIS, though I did visit Gwangju in 1990 (though back then I spelled it Kwangju) for the tenth anniversary of the massacre, which prompted demonstrations of a level of ferocity that made the Seoul equivalents look like tea parties. I soon found out that Press were considered fair game by the loonies on both sides; in the afternoon while seeking non-existent shelter in the merest indentation of a shopfront, a student fired a fist-sized rock through the glass window I was leaning on, and a few hours later a riot cop eyed me through the wee window holes of his gas mask for a second before levelling his shotgun and firing the tear-gas canister directly at me from about thirty metres. I swear I felt it pass my kidneys just as I nearly passed something else entirely.
By Ron McMillan on Saturday 8th August 2009 at 9:42am
Regarding Paul Theroux, having just finished “Dark Star Safari,” his solo journey from Cairo to Capetown, I can’t say I would recommend all 500-some pages (it was a long journey), but the few about his return to Malawi, and the school he taught at in the mid-60s as a Peace Corps volunteer, were affecting for the strong images of futile, wasted effort, but only existentially, not in any socio-political sense.
A far more enjoyable and enlightening read was Maarten Troost’s “Sex Lives of Cannibals,” about his year in the dubious tropical paradise of Kiribati, way the hell out in the middle of the South Pacific.
By Mark McTague on Wednesday 26th August 2009 at 2:53am