Global Geographer

Just rediscovered an article I wrote back in December 2007 for an e-journal that never really took off...

TRAVELLING MAN

There’s a certain inevitability about the type of books that fill my shelves at home. As a lifelong Geographer, I have hundreds of travel books, lined up two deep on the shelves of bookcases decorated with old maps. Whenever I visit a new town the first port of call is a bookshop. If it’s a second hand bookshop I head for “Topography”. If it’s a chain store I head for the “Travel Writing” section. I scan the titles for books which are intriguing, well reviewed or by authors I am already familiar with, rejecting the ‘popular’ books on the familiar theme of “I bought this old wreck in [insert name of country here] and rebuilt it with the help of my grumpy neighbour who is now my best friend, and faced financial ruin, but with the help of my best selling book I now live very comfortably…”

Over the years, I’ve filled my house with books which cover the whole globe: from the Norfolk Coast outside my door to the furthest shores of Tasmania and everywhere in between.

If I was pushed to identify the early books in the genre that I bought, I would probably go back to the 1980’s and a book called “Arctic Dreams” by an American author called Barry Lopez. The book describes time spent researching and working in the High Arctic, particular Canada and Alaska, and the impact that the landscape has on the author. These are themes which Lopez returns to often in his writing. He talks about the influence of the early explorers on our impressions of the landscape which persist today. In the days before people travelled far, they often believed that the tales told by travellers were accurate, which led to the ‘Here be Dragons’ view of the unknown reaches of the world.

As Lopez says:

“Such a mental geography becomes the geography to which society adjusts, and it can be more influential than the real geography.” (Arctic Dreams, 1986)

The focus of geography has started to shift away from descriptions of the land and focused instead on landscapes that exist in the human mind. This has a particular resonance in Robert MacFarlane’s award-winning “Mountains of the Mind”, which explores the part that mountains play in our sub-conscious, and the reasons why people feel compelled to climb them. The book is subtitled “A History of a Fascination”. MacFarlane also wrote an excellent series of short extracts on the link between writers and the landscape in a series called “Common Ground”, which can still be read on the Guardian’s website (see the link at the end of this article)

Jonathan Raban is another favourite, and I remember sitting waiting for an ultimately fruitless job interview at a school somewhere in Nottinghamshire, and reading a book called “Coasting”. The title refers to the general act of meandering around with no particular destination (and has also been applied to schools who are content to ‘rest on their laurels’) He circumnavigates England in a small boat, and throws in a number of autobiographical passages about his family. This blurring of physical travel and internal searching is a familiar motif, and I recommend Jenni Diski’s “Skating to Antarctica” and William Fienne’s “The Snow Geese” in this area, as well as Raban’s more recent book “Passage to Juneau” which features some marvellous descriptions of sailing up the coastline between Seattle and Alaska.

Travel writing is a genre which has room for many different styles, and increasingly it is the search for a particular idea to ‘hang a book on’ which can make some recent offerings a little contrived and derivative.

Tim Moore has a successful approach to the subject. His books tend to focus on themes, developed with great use of self-deprecating humour. In “Frost on my Moustache” he travels through Iceland and Svalbard following in the footsteps and wheeltracks of a Victorian diplomat, and in “French Revolutions” he painfully attempts to follow the route of the Tour de France while exploring the way that the race has embedded itself into the French psyche.

 

Other travel writers are great stylists, such as Bruce Chatwin with his travels “In Patagonia” and through the Australian outback, with its landscape which has been ‘dreamed’ into existence through the stories of the indigenous population. There is also the journey made by Patrick Leigh Fermor through a pre-World War 2 Europe which has since been destroyed. In “A Time of Gifts”, he starts his journey in Holland in 1934, and over 70 years later the final part of his journey to Constantinople is still to be published. With some authors, Bruce Chatwin included, it is sometimes difficult to ‘believe’ their encounters were real, and the suspicion lingers that there is a certain amount of fabrication. This idea was taken to its extreme in a book by Harry Pearson called “Around the World by Mouse”, where the author sits in his house and circumnavigates the globe, gaining his impressions and images of other countries by visiting website and forums, and never actually physically travelling anywhere. The suspicion lingers that a lot of our travelling might actually be similar to Pearson’s ‘virtual’ travels: that we see only the parts of a country that others feel we should be seeing.

The idea that travelling in the mind might be preferable to actually enduring the physical discomfort of physical travel (something which might resonate with those trapped at Heathrow in the run up to Christmas this year) has been explored by Alain de Botton in his book “The Art of Travel”. de Botton introduces us to a book by J K Huysman, published in 1884, which has a Parisian hero called the Duc de Esseintes. The Duc buys a Baedeker guide to London and reads it, savouring the descriptions of the city. He is about to set off for London when he finds himself thinking “What was the good of moving when a person could travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair?” and stays where he is.

While doing my ‘A’ level English Literature studies back in the 1980s we were introduced to a short story by E.M Forster from 1909 called “The Machine Stops”. The story describes a future world where people live underground, never venturing onto the surface, as all their needs are met by the machine. The main character stays in her cell-like home.

There’s a useful line which describes where we may be heading at the moment.

“What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury ? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking ? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.”

Taras Grescoe has produced an excellent investigation of tourism in his book “The End of Elsewhere”, which suggests that we may never really end up going anywhere new, as the world becomes increasingly homogenised, and tourists the world over begin to experience the same things. He experiences many types of travel: pilgrimage, coach tour, cruise ships and 18-30 style holidays and asks a simple question “What are these people looking for ?”

Iain Sinclair, by contrast, delves deep into the layers and resonances that occur to him on his psycho-geographic wanderings around London. Try “London Orbital” where he circles the capital within the sphere of the M25 and discovers hidden secrets and fascinating stories on his own doorstep, which was presumably what he was looking for.

I could have organised this article in different ways. I could have explored particular continents, or the different genres of travel writing. There are the ‘adventure’ writers who are looking for extremes. I particularly like the Amazon adventures of Redmond O’ Hanlon who fearlessly imbibes hallucinogenic drugs, and swims with candiru fish in “In Trouble Again”. There is the approach applied by Bill Bryson who established his style with the first sentence of “The Lost Continent”: “I come from Des Moines – someone had to” and then ploughed a similar furrow (to amiable and comic effect) in a series of wildly successful books.

There are the restorers of old farms/castles/restaurants. There are the writers who endure mishaps and pratfalls, and the others who immerse themselves in a country, learn the language and live with the locals, such as Colin Thubron, who achieve something deeper and more substantial as a result.

People are now increasingly able to share their travels with others using the Internet, and particularly share their photos and images of their travels. There are plenty of journeys to be made, although I have in my book collection a huge variety which have already been documented: to find dinosaurs in the Congo, to visit the Mountains of the Moon, to carry a trombone to Santiago de Compostella, to do a pub crawl from the Isles of Scilly to the Shetlands, to trace the underground rivers of London, to track the properties on the Monopoly board and to travel round the USA in an old camper van… and many more!

In 2004, the Lonely Planet series published “The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel”. This introduced me to some new ideas. One of the ideas I tried myself in 2005 was the use of Yellow Arrows. These make a link between travel and Geography. The idea is to place a sticker in the shape of a Yellow Arrow at a location which means something to you, thereby contributing to a M.A.A.P (Massively Authored Artistic Project). You compose a text message which can be accessed by anyone dialling the number printed on the arrow. If you’re ever in Dundee, keep your eyes open for my arrows.

I’d like to finish by mentioning someone who wrote a book describing his great achievement of walking the European mountain divide in “Clear Waters Rising”. He went on to explore the length of the 2 degrees West line of longitude as it passed through England, setting himself the challenge of travelling from Berwick to Swanage    without deviating more than 1 kilometre from the straight line route. The author in question is Nicholas Crane, who has become familiar to millions through his “Map Man” TV series, and more recently the BBC’s popular ‘Coast’ series. At heart he is a traveller and a geographer. I quite like the idea of producing a geography scheme of work based on Travel Writing, something the Pilot GCSE Geography specification made possible to some extent.

Next time you’re in a bookshop, hunt out one of these titles, and go travelling without contributing to climate change with aircraft emissions.

If you would like to tell me your personal favourites, or send me your feedback on a book you’ve discovered through reading this article, please feel free.

Bibliography

“Arctic Dreams” – Barry Lopez (Picador, 1986)       

“Crossing Open Ground” – Barry Lopez (Picador, 1988)

“Mountains of the Mind” – Robert MacFarlane (Granta, 2003)

“Among the Russians” – Colin Thubron (Heinemann, 1983)

“The End of Elsewhere” – Taras Grescoe (Serpent’s Tail, 2004)

 “Killing Dragons” – Fergus Fleming (Granta, 2001)

“Coasting” – Jonathan Raban (Picador, 1987)

“Frost on my Moustache” – Tim Moore (Abacus, 1999)

“French Revolutions” – Tim Moore (Yellow Jersey Press, 2001)

“Do not Pass Go” – Tim Moore (Yellow Jersey Press, 2002)

“Skating to Antarctica” – Jenni Diski (Granta, 1997)

“The Songlines” – Bruce Chatwin (Picador, 1987)

“In Patagonia” – Bruce Chatwin (Picador, 1977)

“The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel” – Rachael Anthony & Joel Henry (Lonely Planet, 2004)

“London Orbital” – Iain Sinclair (Penguin, 2002)

“A Time of Gifts” – Patrick Leigh Fermor (Penguin, 1978)

“Around the World by Mouse” – Harry Pearson (Little Brown, 2005)

“The Lost Continent” – Bill Bryson (Secker and Warburg, 1989)

“In Trouble Again” – Redmond O’ Hanlon (Penguin, 1988)

“The Art of Travel” – Alain de Botton (Penguin, 2002)

“The Snow Geese” – William Fiennes (Picador, 2002)

 

WEBLINKS

You can read Robert MacFarlane’s pieces at the Guardian site:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/commonground/0,,1547193,00.html

Order some Yellow Arrows and find out more at http://www.yellowarrow.net

And see a preview of the Lonely Planet book here:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/experimentaltravel

Barry Lopez: http://www.barrylopez.com

Check out WIKIPEDIA for articles on most of these authors

"the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes" - Barry Lopez