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Perhaps the most important thing that books do is transport
the reader to a place and a thought that is removed from her immediate location.
There’s nothing better than a good read to ignore the drip-drip of a grey London or
the scorching heat of a Delhi summer. But, amazingly enough while books may be an avenue
of escape they are equally great when we’re in quite a happy situation, not looking
to escape at all. (For instance, is there any better way to enjoy a Parisian café than
with a book?)
In this section we pay tribute to some great books that, even while they
don’t really tell us about a ‘destination’, certainly tell us more about a
place than any travel guide. Four are about journeys and the other two, one about the
tales of an Indian jungle and the other set on a Greek island, are located well travelled
yet off beat places. All of them without exception have one thing in common: they’re
all classics of their times.
- Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne – Snæfellsjökull,
Iceland
- A Town Like Alice, Neville Shute – Alice Springs,
Australia
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad – Congo
- Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway – Cuba
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres – Greece
- Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling – Bandhavgarh, India
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris
Pasternak - Siberia
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Journey to the
Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne – Snæfellsjökull,
Iceland
| Adventure thriller
meets science fiction in Jules Verne’s 1864 classic Journey to the Centre of the
Earth. The book, quite a voluminous tome, takes the reader along on an eventful journey to
the centre of the earth with the three adventurers – the eccentric Professor
Hardwigg, his nephew and the Icelander Hans, their guide. The point of takeoff in this
wild adventure is a volcanic shaft in remote Iceland. While the encounters, the journey
and the events are obviously fictional, the place that leads to them is actually not. |
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Characterised by wild terrain, a coastline that is marked by fjords,
Iceland’s cold northwestern ‘dragon’s head’ peninsula is inhabited
mainly by seabirds – Arctic tern, gulls, razorbills, cormorants that sweep past
stunning cliffs and fill the air with their calls. Of similar atmosphere is the Snæfellsness
Peninsula, further south along the western coast from ‘dragon’s head’. The
highest point here is the awesome Snæfellsjökull, a glacial
strato volcano where Jules Verne situated the entrance to the depths of the Earth in the
Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
The most important town in northwestern peninsula, one with decent tourist
facilities, is Ísafjörður. In Snæfellsness there is
accommodation at the base of Snæfellsjökull where the sands are black and gold, and at Ólafsvík. A small
town perched on the northern shoulder of the Snæfellsjökull, it is
ideally situated for hikes up this great glacier.
For more information on Iceland, click here.
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A Town like Alice,
Neville Shute – Alice Springs, Australia
| In 1950 came the
Neville Shute novel that of all his others has stood the test of time. A Town like Alice
stamped on the English reader’s imagination the horrors of war and brought into
public consciousness what has come to be known as the Bataan Death March, but most
importantly it made famous a place in the barren wilderness of Australia called Alice
Springs. |
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Since this isn’t a literary critique we’ll leave aside such finer
points of debate that a discussion of the novel may give rise to: occidental vs oriental,
the romanticising of the ringer’s life, the romanticising of enterprise… At its
very basic level the story is one of love. It’s 1942 and the Second World War is
still 3 years shy of being over. 19-year-old Jean Paget from Southampton meets Aussie POW
Joe Harmon in Malaya . The Japanese are fighting the British here and at this stage are on
their way to victory. Captives of the Japanese, Jean is on the 600 mile-long abysmal
‘Death March’ and Joe has been commandeered to drive supply trucks. A chance
meeting on the road between Joe and Jean in Malaya becomes the mainstay of the later
section of the novel. 8 years later, the war over, Jean travels all the way to Northern
Territory in search of the man who she had met all those years back, who had described his
home as “Great red ranges against the
blue sky. And in the evenings they go purple and all sorts of colours. And silvery-white
in the dry. And after the wet, they're green all over. I guess everybody loves his own
place best. And all around the Alice is my place.”
Somewhere between Adelaide and Darwin, in the middle of nowhere for all practical
purposes, lies the town of Alice Springs. It took about 62 years - between 1871 (when a
repeater station of the telegraph was set up here) and 1933 (when the town was actually
established) – for the population to reach 200. Between ’33 and now, the
population has multiplied about 150 times.
As Joe Harnon says, “People come up from Adelaide, and they say Alice is
a lousy place… Well, I’ve only been to Adelaide once and I reckon that’s a
lousy place. Too many people for me.”
For more information on Alice Springs, click here.
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Jungle Book,
Rudyard Kipling – Bandhavgarh, India
| In 1894 Rudyard
Kipling, the infamous apologist of the colonial enterprise but nonetheless a man of
imagination and rhythm rare wrote the first of his Jungle Books. A year later the Second
Jungle Book appeared on bookshelves. Kipling’s books chronicled the adventures of
Mowgli the man-child who grows up in the Seeonee Hills in the jungles of Madhya Pradesh.
Found by a Bageera, a black panther, an abandoned babe in the woods, Mowgli is handed over
to the family of wolves because the mother has just littered. |
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The story of Kaa the snake, Balloo the bear, Tabaqui the scavenging jackal, the
Bandarlog (troop of langurs) and Shere Khan the tiger who’s feared by all was
inspired by Kipling’s childhood in India. Kipling, the son of a teacher at the
Jeejeebhoy School of Art, loved the noise and liveliness of his adopted home and missed it
terribly when his parents left him at a foster home in Southsea, England at the age of
six. Kipling did return to India in 1882 at the age of 17 to pursue a career in the
papers.
Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel for Literature in 1907, the first Englishman to do
so. He wrote prolifically but among his more enduring works (thanks in part to Walt
Disney) is the children’s classic, Jungle Book. Jungle Book is a delightful tome but
perhaps even more delightful is the firsthand experience of its setting.
The forests of The Jungle Book are in the heart of India, in the state of Madhya
Pradesh. Fairly accurately referred to as tiger country, in Madhya Pradesh lie the densely
forested grounds of the Bandhavgarh National Park. This is where the white tiger is from,
though none roam the wilds anymore. What you will get a chance to see are the Royal Bengal
Tiger, deer, the sloth bear, gaur, over 250 bird species, the old fort in the environs of
the park, and the famous Indian life that so captured Kipling’s imagination.
For information on Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve and details like when’s the
best time to visit, how to get there and where can you stay once you’ve arrived, click here.
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Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Louis de
Bernieres – Cephalonia, Greece
| Louis de
Bernieres’ book is almost a modern classic only a few years since it was published.
Located in the Second World War, set in the idyllic Greek island of Cephalonia, the book
is not simply a war love story, as the movie version would have you believe. It is a
finely crafted lyrical novel that tells its many stories at a leisurely pace. (It actually
takes about half the length of the 500-page book for Captain Corelli to even make his
appearance.) |
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But of Cephalonia there’s plenty. This Greek island with its population of
interesting characters, the leftists and the conservatives, the local strong man, the
doctor and his daughter, the beautiful Pelagia and her fisherman fiancé who returns from
his war experience scarred beyond recognition. The island is all white sands and blue
seas, a little town that would charm even the most cynical reader simply because its
inhabitants have been etched with the pen of empathetic writer. The book works all the
better because it devotes much space to the war too, in the same even pace as it uses for
Cephalonia.
Many people are surprised that Cephalonia actually exists. It does and it is
a beautiful island. Probably named after the Greek hero Kefalos, Cephalonia had ancient
maritime connections with Ithaca and perhaps even the Cyclades. In more modern times,
Cephalonia has developed as an important centre for transit trade on the Ionian Sea. In
the most recent of times of course, it has come to be sought out by tourists peeking out
of whose bags is often a copy of de Bernieres’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
The tourist infrastructure is good. And any time of the year is a good time
to be touring Pelagia’s homeland. The climate is Mediterranean, the seas are blue and
while one side of the island is palm-fringed- silver-sands-little- cottages perfection,
there’s another side where the water crashes in white waves against craggy cliffs.
The 53 nautical miles between Patras, the largest city in the Peloponnese Islands, and
Cephalonia can be covered by ferry.
Click here for detailed information on Greece and
travelling to its many stunning islands.
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Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad – The Democratic Republic
of Congo (formerly, Belgian Congo)
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By the end of the
19th century the continental powers ruled the world. Britain had already
amassed an empire large enough for the claim ‘The sun never sets on the British
Empire’ to be a geographically verifiable fact and not jingoist hyperbole. Not as
successful as the British but not far behind in the race were France, Portugal, Spain and
Belgium. |
Set in these times, in this situation, is the one of the greatest novellas in
English literature – ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad. When it was
first published in 1902 Conrad was already fairly well known. Born in Polish Russia,
Conrad lost his parents in the revolution there at a young age. Subsequently, when he was
seventeen he arrived at Marseilles, France and became an apprentice at the merchant
marine.
Whether ‘Lord Jim’ or ‘Almayer’s Folly’ most of
Conrad’s stories were based on sea adventures, seafarers, voyage and discovery. So
too Heart of Darkness, which in its brevity and incisiveness is perhaps the best (and most
difficult to understand) of Conrad’s works. A principal part of Conrad’s value
lies in the fact that while the rest of Europe was writing patronising little ditties
about the ‘white man’s burden’ he had the wit to see and the courage to
criticise the colonial enterprise, albeit with a focus on how it spoiled the power-drunk
coloniser rather than what it did to the colonised.
‘Heart of Darkness’ begins its journey on the Thames. The narrative
takes the reader via Brussels, the heart of the Belgian colonial structure, down the
length of the River Congo to the very deepest part of what was Belgian Congo then and is
the Democratic Republic of Congo now.
DROC is certainly not among the easiest travel destinations in the world. But
to make a river voyage along the mighty Congo is the travel dream of many a voyager but
only the most daring will attempt it. The purpose like that of Marlow, Conrad’s chief
protagonist and narrator, would be a journey of discovery. While parts of Africa like
Kenya and South Africa are well traversed, there are parts of the continent that are still
virgin territory.
For more information on the country, the river and travelling there, click
here
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Old
Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway – Cuba
| In 1954 Ernest
Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature for a novel that is actually pretty difficult
to wade through, the text’s pace pretty accurately matching the dreariness of being
at sea just waiting and waiting for a bite. The novel was Old Man and the Sea, and the
tale it told was precisely about that. The old man, a fisherman sets out one day in search
of the perfect catch. And he finds it, a marlin that defies all reasonable expectations in
size and what becomes increasingly important, in spirit. |
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But as the fighting spirit of the marlin comes into play (it drags the old man
and his boat through three days and nights of salt spray, unbearable sunshine and little
food or drinking water) so does that of the man. In the end, just as it’s beginning
to dawn on us that the man and the marlin are equal players of this classic tale of
courage, the sea reasserts itself. Because besides these two central characters there are
others to that it holds – a shark in the waters consumes the fish just when it’s
beginning to show signs of giving up the struggle.
The Cuban fisherman that the old man is thought to have been modelled on was none
other than the captain of Hemingway’s boat, Pilar. Hemingway spent 20 years in Cuba,
in the village of Cojimar, just across the bay from Havana. He returned to the US only
about a year before he ended his life in 1961. Gregorio Fuentes, the ‘old man’,
died a really old man at the age of 104 in 2001. He left the Pilar to the Cuban government
and the people, people to whom Hemingway is as dear today as he was when he was actually
around, drinking his rum at the Zaragozana or supping at the La Terazza. Hemingway left
his Cuban home (the whitewashed cottage in Cojimar is called Finca Vigia) in 1959 after
Batista’s soldiers gunned down his dog. It was just a few months later that led by
Castro and Che Guevara swept through Havana and dethroned the corrupt Batista regime.
While much of Hemingway’s Cuba has changed, there is much that remains. From
the 50s American fin-tailed gas guzzling beauties to the many places he patronised. His
house remains, in much the same condition as it was in when he lived there. The seas are
blue as ever and on some sunny days, ‘the fish are really biting!’
For detailed information on Cuba and what travelling there involves, click
here
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Doctor
Zhivago, Boris Pasternak - Siberia
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When it was first published by the
legendary publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in 1957, Boris Pasternak's tear
jerker/war/historical/love epic shot to instant fame. Controversy dogged its every written
word as the complex tale wove around political upheaval, doomed love, poetry, philosophy
and tragedy. The story tracked the life of the doctor (most believe an alter ego for the
writer), a bourgeois professional and traced gently this man's love affair with the
beautiful Lara, the wife of a Revolutionary. The doctor was also married. The book moves
from the rich setting of imperial Moscow, through the dreariness of icy Siberia. Combining
poetry, philosophy, politics and just sheer good story making, Doctor Zhivago is a love
story, a travel tale, a journey through life and through the vast Russian landscape. |
Few people can now
think of Dr. Zhivago without recalling the ruggedness of Omar Sharif, the stainless beauty
of Julie Christie, the pinched Geraldine Chaplin and the mastery of David Lean's film of
the same name. But the movie actually appeared many years after the book, after the Boris
Pasternak had been awarded and declined the Nobel in 1958 and had spent the last two years
of his life thereafter in a precarious position vis à vis the Communist government.
Unable to produce the kind of revolutionary literature that was required of Russian
writers, Pasternak was largely marginalized through his lifetime in his native country but
unsurprisingly, feted by the West. Dr. Zhivago has come to be recognised as his magnum
opus, a stunning sample of his oeuvre.
Boris Pasternak was rehabilitated posthumously in 1987 and his son received the Nobel on
behalf of his father in 1989. The Soviet Union is now no more and the challenges of
fitting into Red Russia no longer relevant. But the stark beauty of the Russian landscape
remains. The world's largest country, stretching from the continent of Europe across the
northern flank of a massive Asia till its eastern extreme, continues to be dauntingly
beautiful and as grand as ever. And what also remains is the vast white desert of Siberia,
its stark beauty only now open to foreign visitors and tourists. Whether you take the
legendary Trans Siberian Railway (understandably not everyone's cup of tea) or simply fly
to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the journey to Kamchatka, Lake Baikal, past the Urals, to
Vladivostok, Yekaterinburg, Tomsk, Omsk, Irkutsk will undoubtedly be one for the
grandchildren. This really is the stuff of legendary travel.
For more on Siberia sans gulags,
click here.
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