Ox Travels

Monday, 18 July 2011

Edited by ex-Rough Guider Mark Ellingham and others and introduced by Michael Palin, Ox Travels features 36 travel tales by well known travel writers, all around the theme of a meeting. The proceeds go to Oxfam. My half a dozen favourites?

• Madam Say Go – Sonia Faleiro – it’s tough being a maid from the sub-continent in the Middle East, but the author’s airplane acquaintance, just kicked out of Abu Dhabi when ‘madam say go,’ manages to keep her sense of humour intact.
• The End of the Bolster – Sara Wheeler – a perfect fleeting (but who knows?) holiday romance.

• The Last Man Alive – Oliver Bullough – at last, at long last, the last man alive gets to give Joe Stalin a kick.
• The Penguin and the Tree – Lloyd Jones – nature in the raw in Antarctica, but sudden death can be equally horrifying in a much more mundane situation
• The Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient – Ian Thomson – now what on earth did happen that afternoon in Rome? By a travel writer who must be the only out there to write a book about Haiti (Bonjour Blanc).
• Cures for Serpents – Chris Stewart – a wonderful little encounter between a Spanish faith healer and what Bazza Mackenzie would have defined as the author’s trouser snake.