| Chris Welsch The best travel books are their own form of transportation.
With the turn of the page, you're clinging to a rhododendron bush on a cliff in the Himalayas, or feeling warthog breath on your neck in Kenya, or looking up at the sky from the bottom of an ice crevasse somewhere near the North Pole.
Here are three of my favorite literary journeys from 2004. These books are strange hybrids, combining compelling photography with tautly told tales about the wild ends of the world. They will make fine Christmas gifts, even if you give them to yourself.
"The Heart of the World/ A Journey to the Last Secret Place" (Ian Baker, Penguin Press, 511 pages, $27.95). Baker and a small expedition party made news in 1999 by reaching a waterfall in a Himalayan gorge in Tibet that had been the subject of speculation for nearly 100 years. TV and newspaper accounts of the journey described it as the discovery of a new "Shangri-La."
The reality of the trip was much more complex, and this magnificent book is an effort to do the epic odyssey justice. Baker's arrival at the hidden falls of the Tsangpo River came after 20 years of exhaustive research and several other attempts to reach the valley, which is guarded by vertiginous cliffs, ice fields, nearly impenetrable swamps and all kinds of vermin (leeches and poisonous snakes, for starters).
Baker lived in Nepal, learned to speak Tibetan fluently and befriended and studied under lamas.
He devoted himself to Tantric Buddhist philosophy and became obsessed with the Tibetan concept of "beyul," sacred places that -- if one could reach them -- would contribute toward an enlightened state of mind.
The book is about two journeys. One is that of Baker and friends as they seek the waterfall. The other journey is internal. Every encounter in the impossible landscape of the Himalayas has a parallel in the peaks and valleys of the human mind.
After reaching the long-sought goal, Baker questions the impulses that led him on the quest. By revealing the Tsangpo Gorge and its people, he contributed to the inevitable changes that outside contact brings.
Baker's elegant photography and thoughtful storytelling elevate "Secret Heart" far above most travel books published today. The insightful philosophical questions he raises make it a classic of travel literature.
"The North Pole" (Kathan Brown, Crown Point Press, 504 pages, $25). Kathan Brown joined an exclusive group of tourists aboard a Russian icebreaker on a journey to the North Pole. Along the way, she fell in love with the ever shifting ice-scape at the top of the world.
If you stand at the coordinates of the North Pole in the same spot "for only a few minutes, you will be at a different latitude," Brown writes. "The North Pole has not moved; the ice on which you are standing has drifted. In 1874, the leader of a band of polar explorers discovered that after walking two months they had only gone nine miles. They were going south, trying to save themselves, on ice that was drifting north."
Brown alternates chapters between her experience on the icebreaker, question-and-answer interviews with scientists and fellow travelers and the journals of Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer who attempted to reach the pole in the 1890s and spent more than a year traipsing across the ice with a friend and a few dogs.
His deadpan accounts of near starvation, polar bear attacks and a near-fatal encounter with a walrus make the most compelling reading in the book. Separating the chapters are Brown's spare and dramatic color photos of polar bears, pack ice and the Arctic sky. The portfolio is a shifting kaleidoscope of whites and blues.
"Zara's Tales, Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa" (Peter Beard, Alfred A. Knopf, 158 pages, $26.95).
The photo on the cover of "Zara's Tales, Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa" is quite arresting. A dark-haired, 3-year-old girl nonchalantly drapes herself over the side of a full-grown, scimitar-tusked wart hog. It's the kind of pose one would expect with the family dog, not a dangerously unpredictable wild animal.
But author Peter Beard's daughter Zara did not grow up with a friendly black lab. She grew up in Kenya; her pet was a wart hog. And her dad roped rhinos, captured giant crocodiles and hooked 200-pound Nile perch, among other unlikely adventures.
The book is full of the type of story that would seem stupidly improbable if it were included in a work of fiction. Beard has a distinct advantage. As a professional photographer who worked for Life magazine in its glory days, he provides artful images that show rhino rodeos, fish big enough to swallow a man and lions roaring at arm's length.
He tells these tales with the cheerful nonchalance of an excited 12-year-old, keeping true to the promise he makes in the book's first chapter:
"As this world shrinks and turns and changes in front of your eyes, try and remember that what I've put down here is true and that Nature's truth is always greater, stranger, more complex, and more incredible than mankind's make-believe."
----
Chris Welsch is atwelsch@startribune.com
More coverage from the Star Tribune is available at http://www.startribune.com
© 2004 Star Tribune. All Rights Reserved.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment