Not Your Typical Guidebooks: Travel Books Readers Can Relish Without Leaving Home

Let's face it-much of what we think of as travel writing is really just travel listing. It's useful, but not very inspiring. Here, we're celebrating something different.
Travelers often link up with each other at a cafe or bar and share stories as if they're old friends. The best travel prose makes readers feel as if they're the ones on the other side of the coffee mug or whisky bottle. Twelve new books from independent presses give readers that pleasure, delivering dozens of voices-some famous, others new, several brilliant-that come through in pages brimming with the joys and pains of getting from here to there.
Laughs are high on the itinerary. Funny things happen when people leave home, or the country. Gone are the dispassionate experts; arrived are the self-professed hapless voyagers, bumbling idiots, and ardent troubadours telling stories with humility and insight.
"If you can make peace with the concept of travel as a comedy waiting to happen, then almost nothing can rob you of the deeper thrill of it," Jessica Maxwell writes in Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write From the Road. This girls-bare-all anthology from Travelers' Tales has plenty of thrills. While dancing through the sorts of fiascoes only women can have, most of the writers display a measure of pluck that would have charmed Hemingway: Alison Wright eludes a horny wanna-be husband; JoAnn Hornak escapes stampeding elephants; Anne Lamott wrestles self-esteem with the "Dear Aunties"; Ellen DeGeneres avoids nightmares-but that's about all-on a terrifying flight; Jennifer Leo sheds her innocence while watching Thai dancers smoke cigarettes between their legs. This book, grand prize winner of the 2003 North American Travel Journalists Association Awards and now translated into Dutch, Thai, Korean, and Chinese, showcases a community of adventurers liberated by the rhetoric of humor. The stories are for both men and women-but maybe not for children.
In another smart and funny anthology from Travelers' Tales, Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why, writers reveal such helpful information as how to slay a giant rat in West Africa and how to cross-dress for a boxcar journey with hobos. They hunt mammoth dildos and meditate on the communication values of dung. They pursue inner demons and capture real-life diablos. The writing is compelling enough to interest even readers who anticipate that their travels will be rat- and hobo-free.
RDR Books has produced a winning collection of enthralling stories written by field scientists who have no trouble confessing, I've Been Gone Far Too Long. Readers travel along with the experts as they creep among electric eels in eastern Brazilian Amazonia, forage with the indigenous Ache tribe in Paraguay, wield Diane Fossey's Smith & Wesson pistol to save silverback gorillas, and perform surgery on a Maasai girl gored by a buffalo.
Travel requires a constant mental boogie, but occasionally things get so bad that the rhythm leaves the soul. In RDR Books' second 2003 anthology, I Should Have Just Stayed Home, writers commiserate on incidents as distasteful as
getting crushed between drunken revelers at a Bavarian Oktoberfest, receiving a cold stare from Jacques Chirac's body guard, or being fondled on a dirty bus in Nepal. This book reminds us that even in our worst moments, we're not alone.
Guidebooks help travelers make practical decisions; anthologies of travel narratives centered on a single destination provide a deeper understanding of a place. Travelers' Tales "True Stories" books do that and more. In Alaska: True Stories, writers explore how the rugged environment draws out their vulnerabilities and strengths-as in an account of a brush with bears and an analysis of why people enter the wilderness unprepared. Essays in the Provence and the South of France: True Stories collection celebrate sensual delights-the scent of lavender, the tang of olives, the wholesome smell of bread baked in a stone oven. The Alaska stories tell of soaring, kayaking, and
running; the Provence narratives are of exploring, discovering, and, naturally, sipping.
In another take on women's journeys, Travelers' Tales has also released its fourth edition of the anthology A Woman's World. In this eclectic collection, Ann Zwinger camps in the seaside cave setting for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Tracy Johnston battles hot flashes on the Boh River, and Laurie Gough races across Canada on a motorcycle with a speed demon named Clarence. These discoverers relate their tales with candor and compassion. Editor Marybeth Bond writes in her preface: "Many women use travel as the cocoon stage in which to grow, discover themselves, and make changes that would be harder to make at home." This book will inspire many readers to make changes of their own, even if they aren't women, even if they don't leave home.
Four of this year's releases recount extended journeys. One is too funny to put down. In Hotel on the Roof of the World by Alec Le Sueur, the author leaves his job at a Paris luxury hotel to work in Lhasa, Tibet at the "unlikeliest Holiday Inn in the world." Treading the confluence of Chinese, Tibetan, and Western cultures, Le Sueur revels in the craziness around him. Meanwhile, he rescues a mountaineer from the People's Number One hospital, launches the first-ever Miss Tibet contest, makes friends among the city's twisted streets, and survives a rat removal program that leaves dozens of frozen carcasses in the heat ducts.
Other accounts of longer journeys arrive as collections of essays and journal entries. Through nineteen monthly e-mails, Jennifer and Erik Niemann share their honeymoon adventures traveling the world in Chasing Summer. After their wedding, the two sell their homes, quit their jobs, and leave town. Their book includes globe-spanning tips such as what to expect on a Galapagos Islands tour and how to get around New Zealand in a campervan. In Tuscan Echoes: A Season in Italy, Mark Gordon Smith explores his favorite region from a rented apartment in Florence. His essays are written like letters home describing his fascination with the arts, culture, and history.
For a much different take on an extended visit, The Land of War Elephants by Mathew Wilson details one man's experiences in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India during the 1960s and 1980s. The author arrived in Pakistan in 1967 with his pregnant wife and young son. His determination to know the region that he'd studied so long in books thrust him into many adventures-including running an armed checkpoint between Afghanistan and Pakistan in order to get his injured son to a hospital, and "snorkeling" flooded rivers with a filler spout from a fuel can. Returning to the region in the 1980s, Wilson traced the route of a nineteenth-century tribal princess whose heroic acts have earned her the status of an Indian Joan of Arc among some observers. Wilson enlivens his stories with rich detail and deep historical context.
The deepest (dare I say weightiest?) of all the books in this selection is Gravity: The Allure of Distance by W. Scott Olsen. In this collection of cerebral essays, the author, an English professor, deconstructs the act of travel using his experiences in North America and New Zealand. His essays tackle such questions as: How do we map our travels, both physically and mentally? What moves wanderers to take to the road-the mountains, the prairies, the Arctic poles? How do we define home? Olsen's essays give structure to our deepest musings, and leave us wiser about the exchange of here for there than we imagine one travel book ever could.
Punctuating this group of travel narratives is an anthem of images, Alison Wright's photography book, Faces of Hope: Children of a Changing World. Nothing reveals the commonalities among people better than the faces of children. In sensitive and sometimes haunting photos, Wright captures honest moments among children at work and play in Turkey, Mexico, Syria, Jordan, Guatemala, China, Kenya, and elsewhere. This beautiful book does more than just dress up a coffee table; it delivers a vital message, the kind that only the perspective gained by travel can produce.
None of these books will come in handy for tourists trying to choose a hotel or find the train station. They serve a more fundamental purpose-to remind us of why we take journeys.

Alaska: True Stories
By Bill Sherwonit, Andromeda Romano-Lax, and Ellen Bielawski (editors)
Travelers' Tales
1-885211-96-1
Chasing Summer: Exploring the World on an 18-Month Honeymoon
By Jennifer and Erik Niemann
JSL Publishing
0-9728643-4-2
Faces of Hope: Children of a
Changing World
By Alison Wright
New World Library
1-57731-223-6
Gravity, the Allure of Distance
By W. Scott Olsen
The University of Utah Press
0-87480-749-2
Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventures
By Sean O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, and James O'Reilly (editors)
Travelers' Tales
1-885211-97-X
The Hotel on the Roof of the World: From Miss Tibet to Shangri-La
By Alec Le Sueur
RDR Books
1-57143-101-2

I Should Have Just Stayed Home: Award Winning Tales of Travel Fiascoes
Roger Rapoport, Bob Drews and Kim Klescewski (editors)
RDR Books
1-57143-096-2
I've Been Gone Far Too Long: Field Trip Fiascoes and Expedition Disasters
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and Wendy Logsdon (editors)
RDR Books
1-57143-054-7
The Land of War Elephants, Travels Beyond the Pale Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India
Mathew Wilson
Nomad Books
0-9659258-9-7
Provence and the South of France:
True Stories
James O'Reilly and Tara Austen
Weaver (editors)
Travelers' Tales
1-885211-87-2
Sand in My Bra and Other Misadventures: Funny Women Write From the Road
Jennifer L. Leo (editor)
Travelers' Tales
1-885211-92-9
Tuscan Echoes: A Season in Italy
Mark Gordon Smith
Almar Books
0-9740983-0-2