Reviewed by Richard West

“Perils he sought not, but ne’er shrank to meet:

  The scene was savage, but the scene was new;

  This made the ceaseless toil of travel sweet.” (“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Byron)

For 50 years Paul Theroux has been a traveling man, and as dean of American travel writing, chronicled his wanderings in fifteen best-selling books. Like Childe Harold, for Theroux it has not been a question of happiness but the happiness of the quest. Occasionally, as in “The Kingdom by the Sea,” he has come across as ornery as a bunkhouse cook, but, for me, that has been part of the great charm found in his writings. Lovely prose, displaying the curiosity of great explorers, opinions!, chronicling the Sisyphrustrations of hard daily travels absent in “tourism” have been the admirable hallmarks of his travel narratives.

Ten years ago in “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town” Theroux explored the right-hand-side of Africa. In his new “The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari” he resumes his trip in Cape Town and “after seeing how that city had changed in ten years, travel north in a new direction up the left-hand-side until I found the end of the line, either on the road or in my mind.” Both it turns out in this bitter-sweet wonderfully-crafted book that takes him from South Africa north through Namibia to the dreadful abyss of Angola. Energetic Paul Theroux has aged very well (he is 71), but much of the Africa he found in this new book is a violent trashcan of MRE’s (morally repugnant elites) or living-on-the-edge poor folk.

It starts well in Cape Town– improved townships, a booming economy, the enduring beauty of Table Mountain which holds more plant species than all of the British Isles—and lovely towns to the northwest like Citrusdal and Springbok. Namibian cities like Windhoek and Swakopmund are clean and orderly, reflecting their Germanic heritage. But look on their outskirts: hardscrabble gatherings  like Swakopmund’s Mondesa bleak township with its poverty, high HIV/AIDS infection rates, unemployment, and general neglect.

 And it gets worse the closer Theroux gets to Angola, the only African colony that began as a penal settlement. “Portugal’s Siberia” Theroux calls it, now obscenely rich ($40 billion annually) from off-shore oil and diamonds, yet remains a brutalized landscape with stumps of deforestation, burned-out tanks from a decades-long civil war, poisoned streams, no wild animals (all killed in the fighting or eaten by the hungry populace).  He gamely endures the squalor, an ATM fraud of $48,000, the rudeness and contempt of officials, the deaths of three friends (one beaten to death), inedible food, what sociologists call “challenging urban environments” and we call bad neighborhoods, as he sinks into a Lear-like lamentation at the ruination of his beloved Africa. By the end you picture our seasoned traveler with his head in his hands like Van Gogh’s portrait of Dr. Gachet.

“Zona Verde” is a euphemism for the bush, the non-urban outback Theroux loves the most. Yet this train-loving traveler refuses the trip: “Not this time. I had no desire to board the train. And, thinking it, I was joyous—a great relief to conclude that this was the end of my trip. No more…I felt beckoned home.” OWAWA, oh well, Africa wins again.

   Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters

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Reviewed by Richard West

Perhaps you’ve noticed the recent spate of travel articles on Colombia, hitherto a pariah country of ab ovo civil war and bad Karmageddon-esque drug creation, using, exporting, and killing. Most of us have avoided it or thought of Colombia as an imaginary land like Swift’s Lilliput. Now it seems the government has, perhaps temporarily, quelled the internal revolution and the drug violence has ebbed, though there seems to still be the occasional el paseo de los millonairios, the millionaires’ stroll when Senor Gorganfeller is driven across town with a pistol stuck in his ribs as his ATM accounts are emptied.  Given the new interest in the country, two travel narratives  appeared late last year in London, both purchasable via www.amazon.co.uk.

The best by far is Tom Feiling’s Short Walks From Bogota: Journeys in the New Colombia, whose first book, appropriately, was The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World.  Feiling’s Colombia remains a “sunny place for shady people” as General Sir George Erskine described Kenya in the 1920’s. Consider: it still leads the world in cocaine production, planted mines, most internal refugees (four million, one in ten), home of FARC, the world’s largest guerilla army, and has the world’s worst human rights’ record thanks to deaths and disappearances of Colombians by government-supported para-military forces—173,000 murders the past 25 years.   Oh yes, Colombian chefs have an aversion to using herbs and spices.

Anything positive besides the sun still moving 15 degrees an hour? Well, Columbia is the world’s most biodiverse nation, and it makes sensational juice-drinks, especially mango and passion fruit. No country has more species of birds or frogs. Its lakes and rivers contain more freshwater than those of the U.S. and Canada combined. Colombian women are legendarily beautiful, perennial winners of beauty contests. Feiling’s report also is a winner, a perfect blend of now, history, opinions, and research.

Not so perfect is Michael Jacobs’ The Robber of Memories: A River Journey Through Colombia. The waterway being the country’s main riverine highway, the Magdalena, a river Jacobs describes bittersweetly as “an open drain, albeit still a very enticing drain” thanks to years of sewage, waste, and as the last resting place for one-third of the civil war’s victims. His trip along the sluggish river, the color of cream-tea , is a bore with its unchanging jungly banks dotted with poor villages.

Once on land for the last half of the journey the book greatly improves.  With Dr. Francisco Lopera, one of the world’s Alzheimer’s experts, Jacobs visits the sad village of Angostura, home of the paisa mutation, a form of the terrible disease found in the central cordillera of the Andes. Later on his way by horseback to the river’s source, his party is stopped, questioned, and held for a time by an armed outback group of FARC . Luckily, no harm’s done but the interruption was very unpleasant.

Confession session: given all the other upper shelf places on earth and because the place still seems like a Frankenstymied golem, I’ll remain an informed Colombian armchair traveler thanks to these two books.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Richard West

Reviewed by Richard West

Employing retrospective clairvoyance, i.e. Monday-morning quarterbacking, we find that, with the exception of our number one walkaway hit,  this year’s nonfiction travel narratives have not been memorable like a great love affair but satisfactory like a good tailor. The A-list Americans—Paul Theroux, William Least Heat-Moon, Tony Horwitz—didn’t publish, thus, currently, two of our best are available only in Britain, most easily bought via www.amazon.co.uk.  Still, our five selected this year recognize and expand on Imam al-Shafi’s five advantages of travel:

“Arise and go a-roving if you’re in the mood

To earn the money, and the manners, to live well;

To feed your brain, to free your mind from cares that brood;

Not least to meet with other men whose mind excel.”

The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, by Robert Macfarlane (Viking, $27.95). Far and away the best of the year is Macfarlane’s lyrically beautiful prose on the joys of putting one foot in front of the other, mostly in his native England, but also in the eastern Himalayas, the occupied Palestinian territories, and Spain’s Camino de Santiago. I can’t improve on a rapturous mention in a recent Sunday “New York Times Book Review”:  “He wears his polymath intelligence lightly as his mind roams across geology, archaeology, fauna, flora, architecture, art, literature…retrieving small surprises everywhere he walks.”

A Journey To Nowhere: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Courland, by Jean-Paul Kauffmann (MacLehose Press, London, L18.99). Courland? Nowhere indeed.  Well, a Latvian duchy in the 18th century, now most of that Baltic nation that trembles on the brink of the archaic like silent films the year sound appeared.  Arguably France’s finest travel writer, Kauffmann, at the wheel of a Skoda, motors through this Baltictude discovering the planet’s best rye bread, the world’s northern most vineyard near Sabile on the 57th parallel, and a former KGB prison where tourists can undergo for about eight Euros a night the “K.G.B. extreme experience.”

Looking For Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, by Noo Saro-Wiwa (Soft Skull Press, $15.95). My fervent thanks to Ms. Saro-Wiwa for writing this perfect armchair travel book. I’d rather eat worms than visit this dangerous, crumbling country run by corrupt nincompuppets, where 90% of its people survive on less than $2 daily,  that in a quarter of a century will have 300 million people in an area the size of Arizona and New Mexico. In the Muslim north, markets sell Saudi Arabian hand amputation machines. Transwonderland? Nigeria’s pitiful Disney World, a chair-o-plane, dragon rollercoaster, dodge-em cars, and Ferris wheel, all rusting in tall grass near Ibadan.

In Another World: Among Europe’s Dying Villages, by Tom Pow (Polygon Press, Edinburgh, L12). Who knew? In the next 30 years, Europe will lose almost a third of its population.  One hundred of Spain’s 5,000 villages face imminent extinction; since 2005, 11,000 Russian villages have disappeared; one-third of Italy’s farm land is fallow. Pow, a Scottish writer and poet, travels to Italy, Spain, France, Greece, and Russia discovering landscapes described in Gogol’s “Dead Souls” as “desolate and splendid.” The defining feature, as he writes, is absence which is not emptiness but loss.

Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, by Benjamin Taylor (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, $27.95). No year’s best is complete without a book set in Italy and Taylor’s is fine indeed. The place has been chronicled since Aeneas’s  arrival, yet Taylor rediscovers with charm and scholarly learning the “visitable past” in Henry James’s phrase. And he’s kind enough to mention several cafes and restaurants no one would want to miss on the next visit: Naples’s La Locanda del Grifo, the Inn of the Griffin; Capri’s Le Grotelle; and, of course, Naples’s famous Caffé Gambrinus (est. 1860), “sacred ground like the Flore in Paris, the Central in Vienna, the Pedrocchi in Padua, the Quatre Gats in Barcelona.” Well said, sir.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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“Hidden Gardens of Paris” by Susan Cahill

By Richard West

My 2012 Too-Hip-To-Grip Marketing Award goes to those amusing hommes and femmes at the Park Hyatt Paris-Vendome hotel. Here’s why. You’re not there very long, eyeing the glamorous heteroflexibles and other schmooseoisie who are eyeing each other or the eye-catching modern art (isn’t that a Roseline Granet?), when you notice a delightful , omnipresent scent. Not floral, musky, with a hint of sandalwood. Or civet.  “Is it the perfume from a dress/that makes me so digress?” asked T.S. Eliot in “Prufrock.” No, Tom, no dress, it’s an airborne mystery.

But after an absent-minded query to a staffer, a mystery that automagically appeared in my room in a spray bottle from Blaise Mautin Parfumeur (“Exclusively for Park Hyatt Paris-Vendome”), so now in my simple American cottage I can mist the kitchen, and, wa la!, I’m back in one of the great city’s nicest hotels, musing about another black current mojito while contemplating one of six Ed Paschke’s really unreal paintings in the dark bar.  Genius!

But my mission isn’t sniffing out hotels. After Hamlet-like agonizing, I’m here to explore three gardens selected from Susan Cahill’s helpful guide, “Hidden Gardens of Paris.”

Jardin de la Vallee Suisse, Paris.

The first is the hidden La Vallee Suisse at the corner of avenue Franklin D. Roosevelt and Cours la Reine.  First I advise a cocktail round the corner at the impossibly lovely outdoor Minipalais Café adjoined to the Grand Palais, then to the narrow stairs leading down to the Swiss Valley that “New York Times” writer Elaine Sciolino describes as a “tiny stage set.” A small waterfall, a weeping beech tree, lilacs and maples, a wooden footbridge—the perfect edenic , quiet spot to contemplate whether the poet Baudelaire really wore a green wig.  I find that musing often leads to hunger so perhaps to the nearby Grand Palais Restaurant at the American presidential corner of Franklin D. Roosevelt and avenue General Eisenhower.

Square Rene-Viviani

Next to the incomparable Shakespeare & Co. bookshop on rueBucherie facing Notre Dame across the Seine, then a squat-tez-vous stop next door at the Square Rene-Viviani (25, quai de Montebello). It’s one of the great vista-resting spots in the world, benches, deep shade, supposedly Paris’ oldest tree (acacia, 1601), roses, watercolor painters, and a tall fountain in the center that relates the story of the nearby Saint-Julien le Pauvre church on the park’s southwest corner, the city’s oldest (1170-1240). Then a relaxing glass of wine on the opposite side of Shakespeare & Co. at La Bucherie Café-Restaurant while pondering which quai Gerard de Narval walked his pet lobster on a leash.

Square Georges-Cain, Paris

Last stop, into the Marais to Square Georges-Cain (8, rue Payenne), also an archeological depository of stone fragments from older gardens, Ms. Cahill reports, scattered around a circular garden with a sculpture called Dawn. Why Georges Cain? He was the first curator of the Carnavalet museum bordering the square. In late spring you’re engulfed in blooming rose bushes. Very private and quiet and close to several Marais museums, the ideal place to wonder if Gustav Mahler’s bust in the Rodin Museum  really is labeled “Mozart.” Ah, but that’s for another trip.

“Hidden Gardens of Paris”, Susan Cahill, St. Martin’s Griffin press, $19.99.

  Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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By Richard West

This month I come to praise the University of Chicago Press’s series, Cultural Trails: Adventures in Travel.  Here’s their manifesto from the website: “Whereas most travel books focus on a particular place—a country, a city, a region—these volumes take as their first subject the exploration of a cultural experience in history, in art, in religion. The result is a ‘cultural trail’ etched out by the author.”

Four years ago I read the first Cultural Trail, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West, by Erin Hogan, public affairs director of the Art Institute of Chicago, as she sought out objets de art too large for a gallery:  Robert Smithson’s 1500-foot-long spiral of rocks and dirt off the edge of the Great Salt Lake, Walter De Maria’s 400 steel poles comprising his Lightning Field in New Mexico, James Turrell’s Roden Crater near Flagstaff, and others.

Last year’s Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Bronte’s Grave by Cambridge classics professor Simon Goldhill honored the Victorian era’s creation of literary pilgrimages by visiting  five destinations,  along with the three writer homes associated with the title, Shakespeare’s house in Stratford-Upon-Avon and the two Lake District homes of William Wordsworth.

He didn’t’ actually see Sir Walter Scott’s buttocks at his baronial pile, Abbotsford, 35 miles from Edinburgh, but the creases made by same in his chair in the study. Goldhill’s most awe-inspiring moment:  Scott’s library (or perhaps more precisely a litropolis)—holding more than 9,000 books. And thanks to the pilgrimaging professor, the next time someone asks you what singer Loretta Lynn and Wordsworth have in common, you can reply both had bedrooms papered in newspapers.

Goldhill finds Shakespeare’s house in Stratford  predictably cheesy—two plastic chicken pieces in the kitchen pot, plastic fire in fireplaces—but Freud’s house on Hampstead’s Maresfield Gardens Street, where he fled the Nazis in 1938, sounds well worth visiting. Alas, unlike his place in Vienna at 19 Berggasse (now the Freud Museum) there’s no sex shop called Boudoir across the road with blown-up condoms featuring Freud’s face in the windows.

The just-published Cultural Trail, Robert Kaster’s The Appian Way: Ghost Road, Queen of Roads,  literally is a trail, one 353 miles long from Rome to Brindisi, begun by Appius Claudius in 312 BC and eventually part of an astonishing 76,000 miles of Roman Empire roads.  Dr. Kaster, another professor of classics, begins by exploring a few miles leading out of Rome, then in rental car, drives slowly from Brindisi on the Calabrian coast northwest to  Rome.  No doubt the professor recalled, passing wind farms and gas stations, that in 71 BC Marcus Licinius Crassus  crucified some 6,000 of the insurgents following the rebelling slave leader Spartacus along the length of the Appian Way.

It was Horace,  born in Venusia (today Venosa) about mid Appian Way, who wrote the immortal, “Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero—Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow”. The Cultural Trails series favors Carpe viam, seize the way, and I look forward to the next  cultural viam.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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The English Bookshop, Stockholm

By Richard West

In Scandinavia, unlike America,  independent English-language bookshops do not seem to be going the way of the last Tasmanian, the Dodo, the final passenger pigeon, politicians with a conscience.  Amidst every major city there’s a truffling of stores selling new and second-hand books, offering reading clubs, appearances by writers, cafes and free wifi,  unique shops reflecting the personalities and individual tastes of wise owners .  Not long ago, once again, I became infected with a case of biblio-dromania, a manic urge to travel & visit bookshops, this time in lovely Sweden, Norway, and Finland.  Despite knowing from previous visits that they all charge like the Light Brigade.

First stop, Stockholm. “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend upon you” says Lorenzo to Portia in “The Merchant of Venice”,  and I thought the owner of the small, cozy, welcoming  English Bookshop (Lilla Nygatan 11) in the city’s Gamla Stan section deserved the same salutation for creating such a charming oasis in the city’s Old Town.  And here’s a bulletin early in the trip: Scandinavian bookshops don’t only sell mysteries  featuring  girls with tattoos.  Many genres are represented.  Not only that, no matter how many you buy the postage remains the same.

The English Bookshop feels and looks traditional, certainly pre-E-book, but il faut entre absolument modern, one must be absolutely modern, so against the wall: NewspaperDirect’s contraption that print’s the day’s newspaper for you: 1,500 titles from 85 countries in 40 languages.  Actually who’s surprised: Stockholm’s more cosmopolitan than Isabelle Adjani.

You can see a bit of the shop’s interior by YouTube’s presentation of Sam and Ann Charters chanting Beat poetry, accompanied by local Bjorn Lundquist on stand-up bass. (“Beat Thing at English Bookshop in Gamla Stan Stockholm). Solid, man.

Hamrelius Bokhandel, Malmo, Sweden

In Malmo, on one of the busiest pedestrian-only shopping streets, the tres-modern Hamrelius Bokhandel (Sodergaten 28) looms, a roomy, two-story buildings with weird-but-intriguing ceiling fixtures. Turns out they are “glo-balls,” special Japanese lamps. Just the thing in a bookstore that specializes in design, architectural,  and art books. Also, a very fine selection of filofax and moleskin notebooks. And, appropriately for this part of the world, a huge selection of crime fiction.

Academic Bookshop, Helsinki

Walking down the street in Helsinki, wondering if Preparation H really did try to buy the rights to “Ring of Fire,” I wandered in The Academic Bookshop (Keskuskatu 1), Scandinavia’s largest bookstore and the region’s most architecturally renowned as it was created by famed Finnish architect  Alvar Aalto in the 1960’s. Three floors of austere white marble highlighted by almost crystalline skylights with escalators taking you past 450,000 volumes and to and from Café Aalto on a second-floor balcony. There’s an IT section for missing gadgets, allegedly the finest stationery selections in town, and Friday afternoon get-togethers with writers.  For new visitors, the book to buy: Deborah Swallow’s “Finland” in the Culture Shock series.  A huge selection of magazines and newspapers, of course.

Take a tour of the place on YouTube (Academic Bookshop  Alvar Aalto Helsinki).

Literature House, Oslo

Bookstores, like oysters, need to be winched open and drunk for their sustenance. Where better than Oslo’s  grandly named House of Literature (Wergelandsveien 29) right behind the royal palace.  The name ain’t marketing jive: on the ground floor, books-restaurant-café; another floor just for kids and young adults; the top floor has working spaces for 50 writers; and somewhere in between a large auditorium for lectures, seminars, plays,  and public meetings. And if it’s all too much, sit outside on the nice porch.  Perhaps order one of Hemingway’s favorite drinks, the “Montgomery Martini,” 15 parts gin, one part vermouth, the ratio being the superiority of troops needed before British Field Marshall Bernard “Monty” Montgomery needed before going into battle.  So claimed Ernest anyway. Skal!

  Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Richard West

As surely as Hardy follows Laurel, the most attractive books that cross my desk year after year come from Haus Publishing’s The Armchair Traveller series. It’s not just their beautiful endpaper maps, Claude Garamond’s elegant typeset, or the fine writing, no, it’s also their distinctive size and colors: always a slim-and-trim 8 1/2 x 4 ½ inches, bound in red linen cloth with white titles above and below prints of the painted subjects.  If I still wore a suit, each would fit snugly in my inside jacket pocket.

“The format for the red books came from one of our authors, Klaus Wagenbach (the author of Kafka: A Life in Prague) who himself publishes a series called Salto in Germany (though the “a” in their logo is upside down). We decided it would be perfect for this series, both as it would separate them from the rest of The Armchair Travellers, and because they would make beautiful  books to hold and—we hope—a series to collect,” emailed editor Ed Gosling.

And what luck! As you must know by now, February 7, was Charles Dickens’s 200^th birthday and their latest offering is Peter Clark’s Dickens’s London, a brilliant walkabout guide based on Clark’s five walks about central London.  You become familiar with the format in the first ramble—“From Trafalgar Square to Lincoln’s Inn Fields”—a map with the boldface route and throughout the text  boldfaced words of Dickens or his characters.

“Looking at Whitehall, sir—fine place—little window—somebody else’s head off there, eh, Sir?—he didn’t keep a sharp look out either—eh, Sir, eh?” That’s the signature telegraphese spoken in “The Pickwick Papers” by Mr. Jingle, pointing out the room on the first floor of Whitehall Palace’s Banqueting Hall where King Charles stepped out for his execution.

Mr. Clark, of course, takes you to the Charles Dickens Coffee House (26 Wellington St., Covent Garden); the infamous blacking factory where young Charles slaved with a colleague named Bob Fagin (corner of Bedford St. & Chandos Pl.); and around the corner to Rules, 35 Maiden Ln.,  London’s oldest restaurant (est. 1798) with its Dickens Room with playbills of great writer’s  productions and other memorabilia. Above it, the office that was All The Year Round, the magazine published by Dickens from 1859-70.

As you walk and discover the milieu of Dickens’s fiction and non-fiction, you’ll also discover your favorite Dickens’s quotes:

…”Missus, I wants to make your flesh creep.” (Joe the fat boy, The Pickwick Papers).

…”All is gas and gaiters.” (The gentleman in small clothes, the Nicklebys’ neighbor at Bow).

…”My essential juice of pineapple.” (Mr. Mantalina, talking of his wife in Nicholas Nickleby).

Dicken’s London, Peter Clark, The Armchair Traveller, 2012.

For more information, visit The Armchair Traveller

  Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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On the Road to Babadag

By Richard West

Anybodyanybodyanbody, don’t click and leave, give this a read, how ‘bout you now, one minute of your time, one 60th of an hour, we got some winners, right here, anybodyanybodyanybody, I miss a few, I get a few, no book’s easy.  In fact we got four recent travel book winners so pour a cuppa and settle in for armchair travel:

…After last year’s Fado, Andrzej Stasiuk, Poland’s finest travel writer, is back with On The Road To Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe,  by which he means forgotten villages in the outback of Ukraine-Romania-Slovakia-Hungary-Albania.  A typical day’s drive: “Leaving Hortobagyfalva, I drove into Altina, drove out of Alzen…and ended up in Szentagota.” These are places of no future, of the used-to-haves and the never-hads, donkey carts, the smell of damp harnesses and pig excreta. Other worlds like  Sfantu Gheorghe, a village entirely built of reeds on the Romanian coast where the Danube flows into the Black Sea. All utterly fascinating.

To a Mountain in Tibet

…In the gaudy carny world of travel  literature we all win when the master, Colin Thubron, publishes, and his To A Mountain in Tibet not only takes us to western Nepal and Tibet but serves as a chapter of autobiography.  There’s an air of melancholy here as this aging, childless Englishman, who has recently lost his mother, sets off on a tough pilgrimage to Mount Kailas, the mystic mountain of Hindu scriptures, sacred also to Buddhists, Jains, and Tibet’s Bon faith. As always Thubron’s  thorough research permeates  his lyrical language, especially on the allegedly sin-cleansing 32-mile circular path at 18,000 feet , past sky burial terraces, Chinese army guards, and gorgeous flora and fauna.

Wild Coast

…”Doctors and teachers, I ask you what is Hell?” wrote Dostoevsky.  “I submit it is the agony of being unable to love.” Nice try, Fyodor, but the correct answer is the outbacks (and a few towns) of South America’s  Guianas—Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana– as you learn reading John Gimlette’s wonderful  Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge.  Creepy Jim Jonestown country of past mass death, giant rats, huge snakes,  enormous spiders, caiman, fevers, tenacious ticks, murderous smugglers, and the Makushi forest people whose homebrew consists of fermented cassava, purple potatoes, and human spit.  The adventurous Gimlette loves it, goes everywhere, suffers, endures with bravado. Don’t miss this book so you can give the places themselves a pass.

Seeking Sicily

…Sicily’s ur-travel narrative remains Mary Taylor Simeti’s On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal, published 29 years ago, but  John Keahey’s new Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality In the Heart of the Mediterranean,  is a worthy successor.  He tours the ancient island, savors its grand cuisine, interprets it through its writers like Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, and, best of all, explains the sense of Sicilian separateness, the so-called Sicilitudine.  Who knew the Arab influence was so pronounced, that there’s no future tense in the Sicilian (or Arab) languages, that sweet lemons grow near Mt. Etna, that the only place in Europe where papyrus grows is near Siracusa? This is a fine overview of an island that has attracted visitors for 30 centuries.

  Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Kenneth Branagh as Wallander

By Richard West

In the world of mystery fiction cold Scandinavia is the hot spot these days. Increasingly readers are discovering Norway’s Jo Nesbo and Karin Fossum, Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason, and everyone (including my cat, Fenway) has read the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy (“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”, etc.), 60 million copies sold in 43 countries and don’t miss the Lisbeth Salander clothing line.  But the real connoisseur treasures Henning Mankel’s nine  novels and one short story collection starring the dour Swedish detective Kurt Wallander, set not in Stockholm but in southern Sweden around the charming, Medieval coastal town of Ystad, 34 miles east of Malmo. The books have sold more than 30 million copies in 40 languages and have been made into 26 Swedish TV films. Perhaps you’ve seen the BBC series starring Kenneth Branagh as Wallander.

Meet Kurt Wallander: an inspector with the Ystad Police Dept., melancholy, depressive, diabetic, divorced, junk-food  fancier, down to earth as a broom but also a swallowrific devotee of Glenmorangie scotch sipped while listening to his beloved Maria Callas and Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling in his rather unkempt apartment; maintains wary relations with his grown daughter, Linda, ex-wife, Mona, and with an increasingly addled father, an artist who obsessively paints the same picture again and again: landscape with or without grouse; a rule-bending cop who, clue-searching, occasionally breaks into suspect’s apartments but who always gets his brutalitarians: man, woman, and in “ Sidetracked,” teenager.

Sekel Garden Hotel, Ystad

As a Wallander enthusiast, perhaps you’ve taken the Kurt Wallander express train east from Malmo to Ystad , checked into the Wallander Room at the Sekel Garden Hotel (Langgatan 18), ready to walk the charming smallish city of 17,000 citizens, one-fifth of whom have appeared as extras in Wallander films, to truffle out important Wallander action sites in the novels.  If you’re visiting any Tuesday or Thursday from July to mid-August, you can hop aboard the city-sponsored antique fire engine for movable tours of Wallanderville. Off we go:

…A few narrow cobblestoned streets away, the 182-year-old Continental Hotel (Hamngatan 13), the oldest continuously operating hotel in Sweden, where Wallander often meets his daughter, Linda, for special occasions. Ystad also is the site of Sweden’s first bank and automobile ride.

Stortoget, Ystad

… A long block north, spacious Stortorget, Ystad’s main square where Wallander survived an explosion in “The Man Who Smiled” and fights for his life by the ATM in “Firewall.” St. Maria church is nearby where Wallander wed Mona in 1970 and attended the funeral of his colleague, Svedberg,  in “One Step Behind.”  You must walk to the church after dinner to hear the night watchman climb to the top and sound his copper horn to the four cardinal points every 15 minutes from 10:15 to 1 a.m., as his predecessors have done since the 13^th century.

…A few streets east, past some of the town’s 300 half-timbered houses, is  the outdoor patioed Café Backahasten (Lilla Ostergatan 6) where in “Firewall” Wallander meets to romance his computer-selected date, Elvira, near the weird carved horse head arising from a tree trunk. Clumsy with women since his divorce, Wallander seems to think  they should come with directions.

The Inspector is home at No. 10

…Continuing past the Kings Head Pub (Regementsgata 3) where there’s a big fight in the short story, “The Photographer,” we come to one of Sweden’s most famous streets, Mariagatan, where, at #10, the inspector lives with his library, opera records, dish-stacked sink, and his pale blue Peugeot parked  under lamplight.

…At the city’s east end, the Cineteket (Elis Nilssons Rd. 8), a film museum with Wallander-film sets, close to the large Ystad Studios on an ex-military base where most interior filming is done.

Finally, after rest and refreshment back in your hotel’s Wallander Room, walk two doors down to the Bryggeriet Restaurant & Pub (Langgatan 20), an old malt warehouse built in 1749, now a brew pub. I suggest the grilled salmon in red-wine sauce and a dark Ysta Farskol beer.

Author Henning Mankel

These are just a few of the 48 Wallander locations listed in the Ystad Tourist Office’s “In The Footsteps of Wallander” brochure. I suggest you read the novels in order of publication beginning with Wallandar’s early policing days in the short story collection, The Pyramid, then on to the first novel (Faceless Killers) until  the career-ending last offering, The Troubled Man published in the U.S. earlier this year.

Richard West spent nine years as a writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly before moving to New York to write for New York and Newsweek. Since then, he’s had a distinguished career as a freelance writer. West was awarded the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1980 and is a member of Texas Arts & Letters.

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Yoko Ono and John Lennon standing in front of The Dakota, their home in New York City.

By Ed Wetschler

Central Park, a two-and-one-half mile-long swath of green in the heart of Manhattan, is right up there with Times Square and Ground Zero as must-see sights for visitors to New York City. And the part of Central Park that gets the most visitors per acre (yes, that’s how these things are measured) is Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon and peace.

It was Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, who came up with the idea of creating a peace garden across the street from the Central Park West sidewalk where the former Beatle was shot in 1980. The following year Ono invited countries around the world to contribute to Strawberry Fields, and 50 nations donated stones, plants, even trees. This was one of the first major undertakings of the then-new Central Park Conservancy (which today funds 85% of the park’s maintenance costs, not to mention capital improvements), and it helped reverse the fortunes of a great park that seemed to have hit the skids.

"Strawberry Fields: Central Park's Memorial to John Lennon" by Sara Cedar Miller.

Strawberry Fields: Central Park’s Memorial to John Lennon (Abrams), a new book by the Conservancy’s official historian and photographer, Sara Cedar Miller, explores this much-loved part of the park with photographs, maps, and sharp insights. We asked Miller a few questions about Strawberry Fields and the rest of Central Park.

Ed Wetschler: What’s the one thing about Strawberry Fields that gets everyone’s attention?

Sara Cedar Miller: Yoko Ono conceived it as an international garden of peace as well as a Lennon memorial, so visitors are moved by the way contributions of different nations reside side by side. But above all, they want to see the circular, black-and-white Imagine mosaic.

EW: What do visitors do in Strawberry Fields?

SCM: They leave mementos: notes, photographs, poetry, guitar picks, even strawberries. Some visitors sing; others just stand silently. Some leave coins, as they might at wishing wells.

"Imagine" mosaic in Strawberry Fields

EW: How can people learn more about Strawberry Fields?

SCM: Take the “West Side Stories” tour, one of a dozen or so walks run by the Central Park Conservancy. The guides are very good, and so is the price: These walks are free.

EW: Is Strawberry Fields the most romantic part of Central Park?

SCM: I think the whole park is romantic. Taking a boat out on the lake is romantic. The Bow Bridge over the lake is so romantic that people propose marriage there. The allee of American elm trees on the mall is glorious, as are the Conservatory and Shakespeare gardens, Belvedere Castle, and so on.

EW: Aside from obviously man-made features like the Castle, the gardens, ballfields, and Strawberry Fields, etc., is the Central Park landscape natural?

SCM: The mica schist bedrock you see is where it always was, but park administrator Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux also blasted a lot of rock – for example, to create the Sheep’s Meadow — moved a great deal of earth, and planted new trees and shrubs. Central Park is the greatest American work of art of the 19th century.

EW: Do you have a favorite part of the park?

SCM: I have several: One of my favorites is at the north end at the ravine – around 102nd and 103rd streets – where waterfalls remind some visitors of Hudson River School paintings. In fact, that’s just what park Olmsted and Vaux had in mind, so they constructed a concrete wall with artfully placed boulders; the water running over it is New York City drinking water.

EW: What do out-of-towners learn about New York or New Yorkers when they visit Central Park?

SCM: Central Park is the best place for people-watching in New York City. This is where visitors can see New Yorkers at play, where they can sit on a bench and meet the locals. In Central Park, most people are not in a hurry; they will stop and talk with you.

EW: What’s the wackiest thing you’ve seen anyone doing in Central Park lately?

SCM: I saw a man in a rowboat, rowing with one hand and pecking at a laptop with the other. That’s New York-style multitasking.

Official Strawberry Fields Site

Ed Wetschler is  the associate editor of Everett Potter’s Travel Report, and the executive editor of Tripatini.

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