A recent survey by the travel writing website BobCarrieson.com has found there is currently far too much coddling of readers by publishers of travel books.
“Just look at what’s out there,” said Bob Payne, who is the Non-E-Book Editor for BobCarriesOn.com. “Happy Herbivore Abroad, Birnbaum’s Walt Disney World 2013, Glamping with MaryJane. If travel publishing is to survive, what you want are adventure titles that inspire people to stay home, and read,” Payne said.
“For proof of how egregious the situation is, consider that a book about a mountaineer’s adventures in Kashmir, which included death threats and a kidnapping by people who may have been Taliban, is titled Three Cups of Tea, which sounds like it ought to be shelved with Happy Herbivore,” Payne said.
Among Payne’s recommendations for classic titles that encourage readers to remain in the easy chair are:
In Trouble Again, by Redmond O’Hanlon
During a four-month journey among primitive people in farthest reaches of the South American rainforest, the author of In Trouble Again finds himself in the dire situation of having ingested an hallucinatory drug that is making the women of the most violent men on earth start to look good to him.
The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
No doubt to overcome the burden of having such a wussy name, this young English gentleman joined Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole. It was an expedition that Scott, despite his far more heroic-sounding moniker, did not survive. What Cherry-Garrard discovered during the expedition was that Polar exploration is “the most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
The Valley of the Assassins by Freya Stark
Freya Stark was a fearless Englishwoman who usually traveled solo though many of the most dangerous parts of the Arab world, including the journey chronicled in The Valley of the Assassins, to Syria in 1927, to a “part of the country where one is less frequently murdered.”
No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi
The story of adventure in its purest form, No Picnic on Mount Kenya involves three Italians who broke out of a British prisoner of war camp in Africa in 1943, climbed Mount Kenya with home-made gear, then, not sure what to do with themselves next, broke back into the camp, where for their efforts they each received a week in solitary confinement.
Jaguars Ripped My Flesh by Tim Cahill
As this is a collection of short pieces written mostly on assignment for Outside magazine, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh doesn’t have the narrative power of most of the other titles on Bob Payne’s list of recommendations, but as Payne himself has spent nights alone in the South American rainforest, listening to the distinctive cough-like sound a Jaguar makes, the title has for him a certain “What am I doing here?” resonance.
The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse
With the exception of occasionally coming close to dying of thirst, lice were the biggest threat on this six-month camel journey across the Sahara. Still, lice can easily convince you that you should have stayed home.
BigStock photo.
