RSS
Home
The travel book that started it all
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
.jpg)
Map of Marco Polo's World. Courtesy of www.murrayhudson.com
We take travel writing for granted today. In fact, we take travel itself for granted. In as little as twelve hours you can be whisked halfway around the world. You can fall asleep in your horribly uncomfortable seat on the plane and wake up 6 time zones away - or in a completely new day, depending on which direction you're headed.
The shrinking of the world and the speed at which information is disseminated across it has all but killed the idea of exploration. I can be in Afghanistan, Iran, Patagonia or Portugal in the span of 2 milliseconds on my computer - or a short plane ride away if I'm feeling rather adventurous.
But this was not always the case of course. Two of the books I discussed this week indeed take you back in time to an era when travel wasn't so convenient, exploration and adventure still attainable (especially for Newby, traversing the mountains of Afghanistan). Moitessier took nearly a year to circumnavigate in his beloved ketch Joshua, a feet attainable today in a mere 24 hours or so.
I experienced how big the earth really is recently myself. I was hired to help sail a boat from Charleston, SC, to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. On a plane, this trip might take 3-4 hours. It took us 12 days and 12 nights, nonstop sailing on a very large ocean. With only three of us aboard taking turns at the helm, this translated into two 4-hour shifts per 24 hours. When we finally made landfall in the pre-dawn haze of a tropical sunrise, we were exuberant. I think everyone should experience travel in this way - by bike, on foot, by sailboat - and revive that sense of wonder, experience the enormity of the earth.
Which, oddly enough, leads me to the Book That Started it All - the book that started the idea of adventure travel, started the idea of writing about travel...
The Travels, Marco Polo
Marco Polo traversed Europe and the Middle East in the mid-13th century, eventually ending up in the kingdom of Kublai Khan in the Far East. His extraordinary journey reads more like something by JRR Tolkien, yet is a true account of an incredible adventure.
Marco Polo's travels mark one of the earliest accounts of someone traveling for the sake of adventure and exploration, an end in itself. And it certainly portrays a sense of how unbelievably large the world was (and still is) before technology effective shrunk it. This is the book that started it all.
Related Articles:
Comments
