He actually used this letter as a guide for his formative years, although there’s no fond reunion here, alas. His second influence was a solider called James Whitehurst who found and returned a 16 year old Levison’s wallet and later wrote him a long letter of advice, ending it with “above all, travel”. As is common with such exercises, he picks up Connolly’s narrative where it crosses his own route and then says goodbye to him quite casually, much as he does his contemporary travelling companions.
Ostensibly, the journey was to be in the footsteps of Arthur Connolly, a heavily bearded 19th century explorer and soldier who travelled the famed silk route himself. He gets grumpy like good old Paul Theroux and Colin Thubron … and in case you wonder why I’m throwing all these travel writers’ names into this review, it’s because Wood himself is very much rooted in the old classics himself. It’s a lovely looking book, harking back in its design, in my mind, anyway, to the Patrick Leigh Fermor books, and indeed he’s a bit like Paddy, not knowing where he’s headed, assuming he’ll be able to find a way through, being a bit naïve about taking risks and just generally being a young traveller. It is a journey along the Silk Road, the famous trade route that covers much of the East, from the Black Sea to India, although he starts further back and has a lot of time in Russia, too. But if you’re looking for his latest adventure, this is not it. He hadn’t published on it before and apparently enjoyed revisiting his notebooks it also gives him an opportunity to make and write about a return visit to one of his hosts, with another, in the rather sweet epilogue. It’s worth noting from the off that this is not a “new” travel book by the popular explorer, but a revisiting of a journey he made in his early 20s, in the early part of this century.
0 kommentar(er)
