Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989? I was sitting in the back room of our old house watching music videos on TV. We didn’t have the specialty channels back then, but the cable company was running a free promo all week, and we could watch the movie channel and the music channel for free. I was 17 years old, and glued to MuchMusic — the Canadian version of MTV — when the...
“So it goes” recurs like a refrain throughout this collection of essays, and I found myself wishing it would go on and on. Nicolas Bouvier is one of those legendary writers whose name circulates among travelers, but few of my North American road friends had ever heard of him. It was European friends who told me about his classic road trip book, The Way of the World. The twenty-four year old Swiss...
Not a Hazardous Sport brings to a close Nigel Barley’s series of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and continued in A Plague of Caterpillars. This time, he leaves Africa behind and sets his compass for the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, where he hopes to live among the Torajan people, mountain pagans known for their elaborate ancestor cults and traditional...
Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon in this hilarious follow up to The Innocent Anthropologist. “Returns” is a bit of a misnomer. In truth, he’d only just left. Barley spent 6 months in London upon completion of a year and a half of anthropological fieldwork among the Dowayo people, a group of mountain pagans. But he’d barely settled back into academic life when rumours reached him via the bush...
I’d only been in London for a few hours, and I was already thinking I’d have to scrap a year’s work. We were at the British Museum, sitting one row away from Michael Palin and Sara Wheeler. The topic of their sold out talk was, “What Makes Great Travel Writing.” I’m finishing up a new book about Malta, and I expected to nod knowingly along with the speakers, patting myself on the back for a draft...
Nigel Barley was a rather unhappy “desk anthropologist” at a British university. His fieldwork-hardened older colleagues never stopped reminding him of this, because back in their day, it wasn’t enough to camp out in a library cordoned off by stacks of journals. You had to get out and live with the natives. I can relate to Barley, in a sense. Not just because I read Anthropology at uni, but...
It’s that time again. I typically read about 100 books a year. Everything from travel literature to poetry, history, psychology, fiction and memoir. I love reading lists and recommendations, and I bet a few of you do, too. So at year’s end, I like to take a moment to share my top reads of the past twelve months. They made my list because they were either memorable, important, or just thoroughly...
Lawrence Millman is the author of eleven books, including Northern Latitudes, Last Places, An Evening Among Headhunters, and Lost in the Arctic. His travel articles have appeared in such magazines as Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and Islands. He has made 30 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic, discovered a previously unknown...
In 1982, Jonathan Raban bought a wooden two-masted sailing boat and circumnavigated England in a slow, wandering, unhurried way. He called this manner of travel “coasting”: moving along with the tide, letting the wind decide the direction of travel, and living “on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land.” According to his childhood schoolmaster...
We had a packed agenda on this 3-day London trip, but as luck would have it, there was a two hour window of free time on Saturday morning. It was just enough time to hop a Hammersmith & City Line train at Shepherd’s Bush Market, next to our hotel, and ride it to Hammersmith, where we picked up the bus to Mortlake. I wanted to visit the grave of one of my travel heroes, the explorer Richard...