Three Travel Books

Wednesday, 28 August 2024

I’ve been reading tourism related books of late, starting with Paige McClanahan’s very interesting book The New Tourist. I talked at length with Paige when she was working on the book, so Maureen and I feature in the intro chapter, along with Rick Steves, Mark Ellingham, Hilary Bradt, the ‘new guidebook’ publishers. Her book is particularly interesting when it looks at where the world’s current tourist boom has (Liverpool surprisingly) and has not (Barcelona, Amsterdam, Hawaii) worked. I wrote a blurb for the book:

• Like Goldilocks’ three bears and their varied porridge bowls the rapid development of tourism in recent years can be too hot (Barcelona, Amsterdam, Hawai’i), too cold (all those wonderful places still lacking visitors), or just right (surprisingly, as Paige McClanahan shows, the Beatles’ northern England hometown of Liverpool). Her account of that city’s transformation is just one of this book’s delights. As you’ll discover here, there’s plenty of good and bad in modern tourism, but the mixture is, in this author’s hands, a fascinating read.

My recent theatre visits in London included a National Theatre revival of the 1982 play Boys from the Blackstuff, which was an attack on British Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher’s demolition job on the working class in Liverpool. That was the city’s lowest point and it’s remarkable how it has recovered in recent years with a lineup of excellent museums and galleries (the Tate Liverpool, the Maritime Museum, the Slavery Museum) and, of course, the Beatles, the Beatles, the Beatles.

Next it’s Shanaz Habib’s Airplane Mode – An Irreverent History of Travel which looks at our current travel world through an alternative viewpoint, ie not just the usual First World perspective. So we get something on ‘pseudo-discoveries,’ the western viewpoint that things are only ‘discovered’ when we turned up. Fair enough Tahiti certainly existed before Wallace, Bougainville and Cook arrived.

There’s an amusing little aside on getting a visa to go to France and, because she’s Indian, having to provide an ID photograph with her ears visible. Well I could balance that with my China-visa story back in 2017 when I had to sort out 15 visas for the Silk Road trip I did that year – click here for the opening installment.

Several of the women in my group were knocked back because their ears were not visible in their photographs. I got them to provide new ‘ears-on-view’ photographs and then several of them were knocked back again because they were wearing earrings! And I’ve just gone through the rather time-consuming form-filling-process of getting an Indian visa. Now where were my parents born a century ago? And what was the number of my last Indian visa? And where did I stay in Mumbai on that visit to India?

There is, however, a huge difference between having a ‘powerful’ passport and a weak one. The Henley Passport Index ranks passports, essentially on how much trouble you’re going to face getting visas. Very little for most European countries – the top 5 powerful passports are Singapore, France, Germany, Italy, Japan. And weakest? Well you certainly don’t want to have a passport from Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan.

I was intrigued by the story of ‘Manual Scavenging,’ which is cleaning up Indian railway lines because all the shit gets deposited from the train carriages straight on to the railway lines. Or at least it used to be, India Rails says they do no longer do any ‘manual scavenging.’ Or is that because they simply outsource all the cleaning duties? Or is it because all broad gauge lines have moved on to more modern systems? And how much of the railway system in India is broad gauge, about half of the 130,000km total track length?

Finally The Economist came up with a list of six books about holidays:

1. Death in Venice & Other Tales – Thomas Mann
2. Swallows & Amazons – Arthur Ransome
3. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
4. Jaws – Peter Benchley
5. The Beach – Alex Garland
6. The Disaster Tourist – Yun Ko-eun

I’ve always been a fan for Swallows & Amazons, but The Disaster Tourist was new for me. Jungle is a (fictional) Korean tourist operation which sends people to disasters – the sites of volcano eruptions, earthquakes, wars, droughts, typhoons, tsunamis, avalanches, massacres, radioactivity, serial killers, animal abuse, contagious diseases, water pollution and much more. The disaster on the island of Mui, it turns out, is being created purely for the tourists. Until a real tsunami intervenes and wipes out the Jungle crew.