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TIME Traveler
Get away with TIME's special travel issue
[10/17/2002] |
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Posted Monday, October 20, 2003; 21:00 HKT
Ten Thousand Miles Without a Cloud
One of the fathers of Chinese Buddhism, 7th century monk Xuanzang, traveled to India in search of the true path to enlightenment. Along the way, he survived bandits and snowstorms and the odd tempting princess.
His trip was mythologized in the magical epic The Monkey King—and that journey is the subject of author Sun Shuyun's devotional tome. After an Oxford education, Sun returned to China a restless soul searcher, and so in 1999, she retraced the monk's historic 25,000-kilometer quest. Although her journey was by no means as arduous as Xuanzang's, she has labored through a labyrinth of historical data to create a work that is as compelling for its travel narrative as it is for its historical and cultural insights.
Blue Is the Color of Heaven
Relative to Afghanistan's recent history, 1989 was a placid time. But even with the retreat of the Soviet army, the country was hardly a Shangri-la. Still, ad man-turned-adventurist Richard Loseby had wanted to travel there ever since, as an eight-year-old living in Australia, he met an Afghan.
He finally made it in 1989. Although getting into Afghanistan was complicated (and life threatening, given the fluid warring alliances after the Soviet troops left), he decided to risk it, slipping in on the back of a pickup carrying a load of mujahedin. The country is everything we—if not he—expect: on his first day, he is sent tumbling by the kickback of a do-it-yourself missile launcher and then attacked by government militiamen. His memoir is an entertaining account of a season in hell—and one with a wry moral: beware the perils of following your childhood dreams.
Lost in Mongolia
Some rivers just get no respect. Take the Yenisey, which flows 5,500 kilometers due north from Mongolia through Lake Baikal and Russia, then spits out into the icy waters of the Kara Sea. The world's sixth-longest river, its most important recent activity was ferrying away radioactive runoff from two secret Soviet plutonium plants. Nobody had ever traversed the river's entirety before Colin Angus tried in the spring of 2001. Although hardened by a kayak journey down the Amazon (documented in his first book, Amazon Extreme), he repeatedly entangles himself in harrowing escapades and survives only with the help of generous locals, most of whom rarely, if ever, encounter foreigners. Extreme adventure at its best.
Off the Rails
Part travelogue, part pop philosophy, this is the story of two 20-year-old Australians who for a year, starting in the fall of 1999, cycled from Russia's western border across Siberia and down to Beijing—which, from its outskirts, looked "big and there." As befits their youth, Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly litter their narrative with exclamation marks and scatological commentary. Nevertheless, they're a charming double act despite that, offering up a slew of stories both humorous and sharp. And the people they encounter, whether pierogi-stuffing babushkas, drunken mafiosi or drug-addled teens, are as varied and entertaining as any of Boris Yeltsin's eccentric economic plans.
Silk Dreams, Troubled Road
Relationships made on the road can't be carried back home, goes a backpacker aphorism. Writer Jonny Bealby, who already had two travel books in the bag (Running with the Moon and For A Pagan Song), decided to disprove that unromantic notion. Contracted to make a film about a horse trip with his girlfriend along the Silk Road, he unpropitiously breaks up with her as they are about to embark. Undaunted, he runs an ad for a female companion in a British paper, interviews a dozen candidates and chooses Sarah, an unemployed 25-year-old. From the start, the fledgling relationship is beset by communication problems and other irritations of life on the road. Bealby entertainingly trots out his travails—from getting ripped off at Kashgar's 1,000-year-old horse market to having all his money stolen on the outskirts of Samarkand—but does he get his girl? You'll have to read the book to find out.
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