Today marks the second in our series of posts reviewing movies and books that we think the independent traveler, and the Untourist in particular, will love. Last Wednesday, we reviewed our first movie, A Good Year, and today, we’ll review our first book, or, in this case, introduce you to the inimitable Bill Bryson, an author who’s written lots of books, almost everyone of them a treasure for the independent traveler.
Bryson is (like Peter Mayle, author of A Good Year) a great piffle writer, so if you want solemn observation or deep philosophy, you’ll probably want to skip him altogether. If hilarious and somewhat scatter-brained is your style, you’ll devour this book, and go on a fevered hunt for everything he ever wrote. To get a sense of Bill Bryson, think Dave Barry, with an international, intercultural, and in spots, more deeply insightful filter.
It’s hard to know where to start with Bill Bryson, since he’s written so much, but, in preparation for today’s post, I grabbed a random tome off my bookshelf. ( I own pretty much everything he’s ever written.) and it was his Neither Here Nor There; Travels in Europe (1997) an oldie but a goodie, that gets our first review.
In this book, Bryson retraces the steps of his first trip, backpacking through Europe, in the 1970’s. He’s older, wiser and more crochety now, but just as funny. One of the things we love best about Bill Bryson is that he doesn’t write a rose-colored paen to a certain destination, like many travel writers do. He describes the bad parts of a trip as well; Bill Bryson whines hilariously. He narrates his travails with such clear affection, though, that you end up wanting to go where he goes, just to get into the same messes, or be stuck in the same jams. The first part of the book finds Bryson in Scandinavia. In the middle of winter. This starts out as quest to see the Northern Lights which can only be reliably done in January. Only Bryson can make me positively long to go to the remote, dark, bleak and, frequently,boring, and, nearly always, appallingly expensive Scandinavian destinations. In the winter.
He doesn’t “pretty up” the places. But he lives the bumps outloud, and he’ s capable of finding the funny, even in situations in which the rest of us would have gotten merely huffy and miserable. He makes me remember, that above all, as an independent traveler, you need to be ready to laugh at yourself.
One of the things, over the years, that we’ve heard from Untourists, is that, through Untours, they’ve learned the delights of “getting lost”. Let’s be honest — getting lost, getting into jams — is woven into the the independent traveler’s experience. You can’t go places you don’t know, stay on your own schedule and stay entirely out of jams. Its just part of the deal. Bryson’s genius is in articulating that awkwardness, and spinning fuming into funny. Even better, Bryson, more than any author, can put his finger on both the agony, and the ah-hah. Hidden in the jams that we, as independent travelers, invariably wander into are some life lessons that serve us well even when we’re not travelling. For example, sometimes getting lost is not only OK, it’s the best possible course of action.
Here’s an example of classic Bryson transition from agony to Ha-ha to Ah-ha: in Denmark, the movie seats are assigned. As the rugged individualistic American, Bryson, of course, baulks at this notion, especially as his assigned seat is “beside the only other people in the place and a couple locked in the sort of passionate embrace associated with dockside reunions at the end of long wars’: He takes a seat “a few discreet seats away” , and, of course, Bryson being Bryson, he gets caught:
“..a woman laden with shopping made her way with difficulty down my row, stopped beside my seat, and told me in a stern voice, full of glottals and indignation, that I was in her place. This caused much play of flashlights among the usherettes and fretful reexamining of tickets by everyone in the vicinity until word got around that I was an American tourist and therefore unable to follow simple seating instructions and was escorted in some shame back to my assigned place.”
Can’t you just imagine yourself in his place? But what pulls Bryson out of the the mere “good piffle writer” category is that he hangs in there with his experiences, and eventually comes up with what turns out to be a well-articulated manifesto on why he, and all the other independent travelers myself included, love getting into jams, and, in fact, keep going back for more:
“One of the small marvels of my first trip to Europe was the discovery that the world could be so full of variety, that there were so many different ways of doing essentially identical things, like eating and drinking and buying movie tickets, It fascinated me that the Europeans could at once be so alike — that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cozy inviting places to eat and drink — and yet be so endlessly, unpredicably different from each other as well. I love the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.”
Bryson first travelled to Europe as a teenager who’d never been out of Iowa, so “DIFFERENT” hit him rather hard. And the 1970’s is a long time ago. Sometimes, when I travel now, I see, with increasing globalization, a homogenization of cultures. I think perhaps it’s all gone. His description of the enduring fascination of Europe is passé. Maybe we’re all watching the same TV, drinking the same Starbucks, surfing the same internet and have become indistiinguishable from one another. Dullsville is everywhere.
But then I go on an Untour, and settle deeply down into the tidy rhythms of an Austrian village, or the jazzy ones a Paris neighborhood, or get lost in some new, awkward, delightful way (cough — Greek Untour -cough) and I say, “Nah, it’s still that good!”
You can buy Neither Here Nor There; Travels in Europe from our Untours page here, and we make an infitesmial commission! So please, do. Sadly, and shockingly for we e-book readers, it is NOT yet a downloadable book that you can load onto your Nook, Kindle or Ipad to make the plane ride more fun. So plan on reading it before you go. Perhaps we should start a movement to get all of Bill Bryson library digital, on behalf of bookish independent travelers everywhere. Which is your favorite Bryson book?