In my opinion, the worst part about travelling is flying.
It’s expensive, it’s boring, the food is awful, the people are usually not that interesting, the environmental and financial impact is profound and it takes a long, long time, especially if you want to end up in an interesting place. Not to mention that flying is probably really dangerous although I’ve never bothered to look up the statistics.
(Airports though I find to be endlessly fascinating, especially if you want to concoct stories about people you don’t know and will never see again.)
On the contrary, one of the best parts of traveling is the overland journey, whether by foot, bus, train, taxi, motorcycle, bicycle, or boat. Or some ridiculous sequence of the aforementioned.
Travelling overland can be painful, long, dusty, and full of people you can’t speak to and who might not want to speak to you. In some ways, a lot of the negative facets of flying are present but offset, even obliterated by the positive aspects of overland travel which include adventure, uncertainty, improvisation, risk, the beauty of the landscape, the adrenaline rush of a bus about to go off the side of a cliff, or the opportunity to be struck by an oncoming train in the wilderness of Peru.
Or stepping on a landmine in Cambodia.
Last week, I discovered a book at my store that posits an irresistable premise for a travel book: the German author Tiziano Terzani, back in 1976, encountered a Chinese soothsayer who told him that, under no circumstances should he fly by plane in 1993 or else he would die.
Terzani, a travel writer who lives in Hong Kong was, of course compelled to do a lot of travelling by plane for his profession.
But when 1993 rolled around he didn’t forget the dire prediction and vowed to travel through Asia and beyond solely by earth-bound means. Along the way he sought counsel from other traditional soothsayers, prophets and medicine men.
And thus a travel book was born, A Fortune-Teller Told Me.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
