Seven Years in Tibet

Seven Years in Tibet

By Heinrich Harrer

While reading Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer's sublime work of travel literature, I was struck by a disturbing question. Has the epitaph for travel literature already been written?

For centuries, armchair travelers have marveled at the tales of adventurers who have traveled to distant lands. From the works of Marco Polo and Ibn al-Battuta to the invaluable works of Charles Darwin to the amazing stories of Thor Hyerdahl, travel writers have taken readers to places they could only imagine, told stories of exotic people and extraordinary cultures.

But with the relatively recent advent of cheap flights, social media, the Internet and, most devastatingly, globalization, is the era of travel... real exploratory travel... finished? Well, until the advent of interplanetary travel, I think it just might be.

Let introduce the book and then let me explain.

In Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer takes us inside one of the most insular cultures ever to exist on this planet. Not only was the Tibet that Harrer visited suspicious of outsiders, it had the luxury of being nestled on the other side of the almost impassable Himalayan mountain chain. When Harrer entered the country in the middle of the Second World War as an escaped POW he became one of only a handful of Europeans who had ever gained access to Tibet. Over his seven years in the country (just in case the title wasn't clear on that) he would meet less than a dozen other Europeans (conversely, I met over a dozen western expats on my first night in taiwan in 2002). There is literally no place on earth left that hasn't felt the impact of Western culture (aka globalization). In that sense, Harrer was given the rare opportunity to see one of the last nations on the planet completely untouched by the Western world prior to the Great Flattening.

The book itself is divided into four parts. The first part deals mainly with Harrer's time in a prison camp in India. As a German on British soil during the early days of World War II he was taken into custody. But he planned and executed his escape and crossed the border into Tibet with the intent of reaching the Japanese lines. The second part of the novel recounts the two years he spent trying to get a foothold in the notoriously insular nation. This part was most interesting to me because it was, by far the most harrowing portion of the book and recounted incidents that could only occur in the duty nowheres of Asia. The third part consists of his first years in Lhasa and the final part is essentially an early biography of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, their friendship and his ultimate flight from Tibet when the Chinese invaded in 1951.

This is travel writing in its purest form. Harrer has no Western crutch, no expat community that has paved the way for his arrival and provided for a nice cushy landing. This is the story of a man who made his way in a nation where he may have been the first of his kind (i.e. German) to ever live in Lhasa. Harrer saw a Tibet that few travelers had seen before and none will ever see again. He saw the pure, unadulterated culture prior to the onslaught of the Chinese invasion and the inevitable incursion of the modern world. And since 99% of the religious buildings in Tibet have been destroyed since the invasion and over 70% of the current population of Lhasa is non-Tibetan, Harrer's work is essentially a eulogy for an entire culture.

Now, I haven't been to Lhasa but I have done my fair bit of travel and, while I still love to do it, I have no misgivings about it. I'm never going to have a unique experience in any of the exotic locales I choose to visit (unless, of course i choose to visit a war zone, which of course I won't). No matter where I go, no matter how far off the beaten path I venture, I am treading on roads well worn by millions of people who have come before me. Every medium sized town in Vietnam and Sri Lanka has a Starbucks. There are fast food outlets in Rangoon and Nairobi. You can buy Bulgari watches at the airport in Ankara and Calcutta and I'm sure if you can't buy a McDonalds Happy Meal in the shadow of the Potala Palace, it's not long in coming.

This incursion has made the notion of travel problematic. If you can experience gourmet Indian cuisine in the comfort of your own home, view the cultural splendors of India from on the television and purchase authentic Indian handicrafts via the Internet why, exactly, would you pay vast quantities of money to fly half way around the globe only to find that Mumbai is a morass of the same 18 fast food chains, coffee shops and clothing outlets you just left? And unless you traveled for a very specific reason (i.e. mountain climbing, surfing, archaeological dig) there is never really much difference between Paris, Pretoria and Phnom Penh. Did you travel for the smell? Because that might be the only thing you couldn't have gotten back home.

With all due respect to Michael Palin, Bill Bryson and Neil Peart, who have written some fabulous travel literature in the past 20 years (focusing on travel with very distinct purposes, I might add), we will never again have a book that represents an introduction to a major nation, city or culture that The Travels of Marco Polo or Seven Years in Tibet was. At the time of publication, Tibet was perhaps the last great unexplored culture on the planet. It's a shame that Harrer's work coincided with its demise (and make no mistake, no amount of Beastie Boys concerts will ever resurrect the Tibetan Nation). The Epilogue to the edition I wrote is a thousand times more heart breaking than the book since Harrer' has had a half century to reflect on the events of his book and see it for what we all know it is, an epitaph.

In that respect, this book is also a cautionary tale for Taiwan, the country I live in (Ten Years in Taiwan?). Taiwan has been the focus of a relentless propaganda campaign since 1949 and while the situation with Tibet doesn't provide exact parallels, there are lessons to be taken for any Taiwanese who cares to listen. The recent self-immolations that have plagued the Tibetan capital represent a desperate endgame that has no happy ending. Is this Taiwan's future should China get the opportunity to act? Let's how for Taiwan (and my) sake we never find out.

Anyway, long story short, Seven Years in Tibet is deserving of the moniker classic travel literature and should be placed on the bookshelf with the other heavyweights in the genre. Perhaps (and lamentably so) at the far right.

(Note: I never saw the Brad Pitt movie)

In Patagonia

In Patagonia

By Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin's book In Patagonia is a minor classic in the genre of travel literature. Initially written in 1977 as a series of magazine articles, Chatwin's travels through the Argentina and Chile are chronicled in a mesmerizing freeform style that intertwines his own travels with the unique, and often bizarre history of the region. Furthermore, In Patagonia confirms to me that a certain element in the art of travel has been lost in recent years, but I'll get to that soon enough.

In the course of this book, Chatwin travels from Buenos Aires in the north as far as Tierra Del Fuego in the south (which would be the entire length of Patagonia, in fact). Rather than simply cataloguing the sights and events of his travels Chatwin entrusts himself with a host of locals, depicting the area as one of the most ethnically diverse areas of South America. Not only does he chronicles the stories of the indigenous people in Patagonia but also the surprisingly large numbers of immigrant populations: Aside from the obvious Spanish population, Patagonia is rife with Welsh, English, German, North American, Italian and Jewish families. Chatwin, who has the sort of detached writing style you expect from a British big game hunter in Africa circa 1870. There is a certain laconic wit that pervades through the entire narrative giving it an airy, formless feel.

And that's what's so wonderful about In Patagonia. It encapsulates that wondrous sense of unstructured excitement and discovery that comes from travel. The book ambles along, randomly picking up the travel narrative between nuggets of esoteric history (I had absolutely no idea that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had any connection whatsoever with Patagonia. As it turns out, they have a significant connection). In Patagonia brings us face to face with outlaws, cannibals, con-artists and unicorns. There are a host of eccentric men and women who dazzle us with their stories and Chatwin delivers simply by engaging in conversation and dinner.

Chatwin dishes the story in utmost style. I especially liked the way in which Chatwin bookends his narrative with his own personal story about a piece of skin from an extinct giant sloth that his grandmother kept at her house. The skin fragment was the only surviving piece from the remnants of a giant sloth uncovered from the ice in Patagonia years earlier by Chatwin's grandfather and would go on to the the physical impetus for Chatwin's wanderlust.

The structure of the book alone is worth the price of admission, but the way in which Chatwin weaves the narratives of the local people along with the history into one long, meandering river of words and meaning, it is so much more than a simple travelogue. In fact, I wouldn't use this book if I ever traveled the same course. In Patagonia is just as much about it's time as it is its place, which is why I loved it so much. It's a snapshot into the heady days of Peronist Argentina and the Chile of Allende. While many of the people Chatwin spoke with during his time in Patagonia have since denied much of what he published in In Patagonia, it hardly seems to matter. Such controversial issues don't dissuade from the enjoyment of a good story. It is travel literature the way it is supposed to be written.

See, I love aged travel literature. I have no interest in reading current travel literature. It's all the same. Fly here, see time, talk with him, eat that, lesson learned. Much like travel itself, travel literature has fallen into a predictable rut. This blog is not the place to discuss the pros and cons of globalization but Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat mentality has done irreparable harm to the travel industry. I don't mean tourism, which is alive and well and relaxing on a beach in Cancun. I mean travel. The make-your-way-however-and-with-whoever-you-can mentality of seeing the word. Hitting the road with a pack over your shoulder and no idea where you will be spending the night. Packing light and traveling hard. Travel is supposed to be about discovering the world and all it has to offer. Culture, food, people, ideas, experience. Travel used to offer it all. Now it's been reduced to tracks.

Nowadays you get off the airplane in Beijing, Budapest or Buenos Aires and you have the same stuff waiting for you. The same Starbucks coffee and the same Subway sandwiches. Travelers are given a menu of routes to take and it it increasingly difficult to skip you way off the well-travelled trail. Sure there are out-of-the-way places that you can visit to experience "authentic XXXXX culture," but one more often than not comes away from those experiences feeling as though they duped into yet another culture-for-profit display. It can all be a bit unsettling.

Even those who travel in search of extreme adventure have found themselves pigeon-holed, classified and market researched. Given the popularity of hiking to Everest base camp in Nepal, Arctic adventures and the parade of tourists who climb Kilimanjaro every day, even though who excel at finding out-of-the-way places are having trouble finding themselves off the beaten track.

This isn't to say there aren't places on this Earth that don't offer the real deal for travelers in 2012. Certainly I can think of dozens of locales that have not fallen prey to McTravel, but the ability to travel and immerse yourself in a culture off the tourist track becomes less and less likely as cultures trade their uniqueness for a pair of Adidas shoes and an iPhone. Perhaps my next vacation will be to Antarctica. The cooping of that experience is still a few decades away, one hopes.

But I digress.

In Patagonia is a travel story that would be extremely difficult to write today. Much of Chatwin's narrative would be stories about arguing with taxi drivers and the throng of touts that lurk in the shadows of train stations and descend on people with backpacks like a pack of wolves. I'm not hating on travel, I adore traveling, but it's not the same anymore.

And this is why In Patagonia is a classic. It's a glimpse into what used to be.

A Piano in the Pyrenees

A Piano in the Pyrenees

By Tony Hawks

Feeling a little low today. I don't much get affected by celebrity death but the recent passing of Levon Helm and, then, Adam Yauch today. Feel like a sizable portion of my childhood and adulthood have been robbed of me.

Anyway, this blog isn't about music. It's about books, so I'll man up and get on with it.

I like everything about Tony Hawks. Call him a literary guilty pleasure (if such a thing exists). I like his brand of dry British wit. I like the fact that I could probably sit next to him at a pub, have a beer with him and feel like I've known him my entire life. I like the fact that he saves, and often replies to, emails sent to him by mistake by people who think he is skateboarding icon, Tony Hawk, singular. And I especially like his books. Call it a guilty pleasure if you must, but I love his sort of manly (but not quite juvenile) humor.

I first discovered Hawks via a friend, whose non-book blog can be found here. I was drawn by the way in which he find adventure from the most mundane of places: the local pub. For those not in the know, Tony Hawks is an interesting guy. From what I'm lead to understand, Hawks, like so many British men, spends a lot of time in the pub with his buddies. He's not an alcoholic, but he seems to like his ale. And his buddies. After a few pints, things tend to get competitive with his buddies and outlandish bets are made. But unlike your standard, run-of-the-mill "I bet you won't go hit on that chick at the bar" sort of stuff, Hawks and his pals take it a bit farther and Hawks has forged a career as a niche travel writer as a result.

The first of these bets was a bizarre dare that escalated into something sublime. Hawks's bet that he could hitchhike around the island of Ireland with a fairly large fridge in tow. The subsequent book that followed the completion of the adventure was aptly titled: Around Ireland With a Fridge. His second book, One Hit Wonderland, follows Hawks as he attempts to produce a number one hit somewhere (anywhere) in the world. Hilarity also ensues. My favorite Hawks book is Playing the Moldovans at Tennis, an absurd adventure that find Hawks trying to track down and beat each member of the Moldovan national soccer team in a game of tennis. As you can see, Tony Hawks is indeed an interesting guy.

What each of these books had going for them was an interesting central premise. A gimmick of sorts that provides structure and form around Hawks's cheeky wit. The gimmick is strong enough to pull the reader in and Hawks's humor and style is strong enough to carry the gimmick when it gets stale. It is a wonderful symbiotic writing style and the cornerstone to Tony Hawks's success as a writer (as far as I was concerned, that is). With all due respect to evolution as a writer, why mess with success, right?

Well he went ahead and did just that.

And that's what troubled me so much about A Piano in the Pyrenees (not his latest, mind you, but the latest of his that I have read). It has loads of charm and humor of the Tony Hawks variety and i still enjoyed his humility and self-deprecation in dealing with living in a foreign country (something I can identify with) and struggling with a language barrier (ditto). But  the fundamental problem is that A Piano in the Pyrenees lacks the gimmick that made his previous books so irresistible. I know a lot of people liked this book, and I really wanted to as well. But I didn't. I went into this book expecting what I have come to expect from Tony Hawks, so perhaps it's my fault. Perhaps I have not allowed Hawks to mature and evolve as a travel writer, but I just couldn't get on board with this one.

As far as I can tell, the book is about buying a house in the French Pyrenees on impulse (the first and one one he sees), deciding to move his piano there so that he can finally master it, his adventures in moving from London to France, getting talked into buying and self-installing a swimming pool and his culturally hilarious antics in trying to ingratiate himself with the locals. He also complains a lot about being single in his early 40s. That's it. No bet, no gimmick, no slightly juvenile behavior. It all seemed so mature and grown up. I felt lost with Tony sans gimmick. What are doing here together, Tony? Are we going to get up to no good or are we just going to sit in your living room staring out at the mountains while we discuss the hilarious differences between the French and the English? Cause if there's no fun gimmick, do you mind if I just head off to bed? Maybe we can get up to no good tomorrow.

Aside from the lack of gimmick, this book failed to grab me for a couple of other reasons. First, what I enjoyed about his previous books was that Hawks attempts to win the sorts of bets we might make (but really, actually don't make) with your friends. There was a blue-class hilarity manifest in the narrative that spoke to everyman. I could hitchhike around Ireland with a fridge if I wanted. Sure, it would require a plane ticket to Dublin, but not much else and I'd have a ball doing it. And if I don't I can fantasize about what sorts of nonsense I'd get up to if I did. His adventures always dwelt in the realm of possibility for everyone. Not so with A Piano in the Pyrenees.

While I don't want to speak for everyman, I can't imagine many of Hawks's usual readers are in a position to simply buy a house in the French Pyrenees on impulse, never mind a swimming pool and all those flights back and forth to London. It's sort of like Pink Floyd expecting their fans to understand their struggles with fame and fortune on their 1979 album The Wall. Sure, the album is decent enough but it always seems to reek of self-indulgence and naval-gazing. It's difficult to empathize with Hawks's trials and tribulations when the costs mount into the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars.

Which leads me to the second reason I didn't wholly fall in love with this book. It seemed to lack a conclusion. The swimming pool never does get finished, he never really gets around to practicing the piano and his quest for love is never resolved. Now, I know that this is non-fiction and you can't force your life to wrap itself up into neat little conclusions, but these narratives looked to be well on their way to some sort of resolution when the book abruptly ends.

This book seems to have been hastily written. It is an uneven, ramshackle piece of work that meanders in all sorts of directions (again, without a gimmick Hawks is a boat lost in the night). I'm not Tony Hawks's economic advisor and I don't pretend to have any insight into his personal finances nor am I trying to point a shameful finger (we all gonna do what we all gonna do) but I got the distinct impression that this book was rushed along for financial reasons.

Swimming pools don't build themselves, you know.

Shout Out

I'm always quick to check out what Jonathan is reading over at I Read A Book Once. I dig the fact that his goal is to get blurbed on the back of someone's book and he might just like zombies as much as me. That's reason enough!

A Traveller in China

A Traveller in China

By Christina Dodwell

For anyone that is considering traveling in China (or anywhere in central or east Asia for that matter), you would be doing yourself a service by picking up a copy of Christina Dodwell's excellent travel book, A Traveller in China. Although the book is nearing thirty years of age, it is a wealth for information, and anecdotes by one of the world's most intrepid and fearless explorers. Furthermore, unlike many books on the subject of China, Dodwell dedicates the bulk of her journey to the more remote regions of the country rather than the well-worn tourist track of Beijing, Xian, Shanghai and Kunming. The book resounds as much today as it may have when it was first published.

When this book was published in 1985, China was still in the midst of its gradual transition out from the disasters of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. While it was still very much a cultural and political backwater, the machinations of things to come were already churning under the leadership of Deng, Xiao-Ping. Christina Dodwell provides a candid look at China at a crossroads: the last years prior to its Great Economic Explosion that would roll through the 1990s and continue unabated up until today.

I admire Dodwell's travel technique. She traveled China alone in the early 80s, a time when foreign travelers were a rarity, solo foreign travelers even rarer still, and solo female travelers a virtual non-entity. Having traveled through Asia extensively myself (though not China, I must admit), I can say that Dodwell was never in any real danger among the people, but certainly this trip took a lot of guts. Traveling amongst Chinese populations can be a very lonely experience if you aren't prepared.

Furthermore, Dodwell tends to stray away from the traditional hotel, restaurant, bus, hotel circuit, opting for a more granola approach. She hefts her inflatable canoe along with her and is always keen to put in along a river, lake or stream. She is also keen to stay with local people whenever it is offered, which gives her a keen insight into the lives of some of China's most misunderstood minority groups. And while she is careful not to cross paths with police or other government officials, she makes every attempt to visit places that are still "officially closed" to tourists. Dodwell makes her way to Ju Jie Shan, Lake Er Hai and Tibet.... all closed to tourists in the early 80s. In that respect, Dodwell is an intrepid, fearless explorer who provides a unique perspective on this part of Asia.

Certainly she had the pedigree. Dodwell's grandmother was a journalist during the tumultuous days prior to the Second World War and spent over ten years in China traveling and writing. Dodwell makes some effort to retrace her grandmother's path, starting in Beijing but finds that much of what existed in the 1930s had been destroyed or torn down. In her hunt for footprints left by her family, she is left disappointed.

Despite this constant flux, what Dodwell discovers on her travels through the western and southern provinces (Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Shaanxi, Yunnan, Gansu and Tibet... not in that order) is a land that is not far removed from the 19th (or 18th, or 17th) century. Uighur people living in yurts, Hui people hunting and cultivating in their traditional ways, Miao people sporting their traditional dress and Tibetans dining on yak meat stew (with a bit too much animal hair). The presence and influence of the Han Chinese at the time of writing was still very much tenuous. This book was written long before the Chinese government got vigilant about relocating hordes of Han settlers into these territories in an effort to Sinicize them, a strategy that I am lead to believe is working, much to the detriment of these cultures. To be certain, Dodwell does encounter Han racism along the way. A truck driver who picks her up on the road to Lhasa is puzzled as to why she might want to spend time with Tibetans, calling them dirty and lazy.

Dodwell doesn't get much involved in editorializing her travels and never falls into the trap of cultural relativism, which is refreshing considering the majority of books I have read over the past few years on the subject of China have been largely condescending. She offers some cursory history and other essential information if it pertains to her travels but rarely strays from her own travelogue. She does, however, say enough to allow her readers to formulate their own opinions. That's a fine line, to say the least, and she walks it well, although she did make me laugh heartily when she made reference to a fellow European's fashion choices:

"The girl was wearing short shorts, which many of the younger Western travelers in China seem to wear, not realizing how this offends the local people's customs. What kind of Chinese woman would walk with bare thighs in public?"

Oh boy, Ms. Dodwell, how times change. The question today would read: "What self-respecting Chinese girl doesn't own at least two dozen pair of ultra-revealing short shorts and a multitude of miniskirts that leave little to the imagination?" I got a kick out of that line so much so that I woke my (Taiwanese) wife up just to share it with her. She failed to see the humor at 1:30am. Too bad, I guffawed.

While much of the book focuses on her travels through the vast expanse of nature in China's western provinces, paddling the lakes and rivers in and around the Tienshan Mountain Range and the Tibetan Plateau, it is the time she spends with the people that makes this book timeless. She is invited into yurts, eats everything that is offered to her, travels by horse, donkey, mule and camel and generally has a knack for familiarizing herself with shy communities. Her experiences truly feel as if they were from another century. It is a virtual certainty that she encountered communities who had never seen white people before (it is suspected that Dodwell is the first outsider to ever witness the Dragon Boat races at Lake Er Hai). There's something to say for that.

For those who are interested in the rapid transformation happening in China since the early 80s, this book offers an interesting bookend to the rise of China. It's a solo traveler's account of the country on the eve of major social and economic change. It is extraordinary to read about the cultural and economic values of China prior to the current variation. What's more, due to the rapid influx of Han people into these far flung areas has turned many of these populations into minorities in their own land. We only need to look at the state of unrest and displeasure in Xinjiang and Tibet to see the growing concern over the future of these populations.

In this respect, A Traveller in China is a book that couldn't and wouldn't get written today, which is a shame. It's the sort of book that reminds the reader of the travelogues of explorers such as Ibn Battuta or Stanley or Livingstone. Travelers who are treading new ground, seeing things from an stranger's perspective for the first time. In 2012, there are so vary few places and communities left on the planet untouched or unseen. It's awesome that Dodwell had the chance to cover ground so few outsiders had seen since (dare I say) the days of Marco Polo.

What's more, Dodwell has incited within me the first inclinations to travel in China, a country I had previously had no interest in visiting. I only fear that much like her attempts to retrace the travels of her grandmother, I would find that much of what she wrote about has been altered beyond recognition. Shame.

Classic travel literature. Highly recommended.