Seeing the world through a book

In the past few weeks I’ve renovated a country house in Italy, travelled from London to Japan by train and fallen in love in Vietnam. After I finish writing this, I will hop back on board the Trans-Siberian Railway. Next week I’m going to China and then to Africa in June.

Most of this has been accomplished from my bed, with the occasional stint on the couch. That’s the power of books. They can take you anywhere.

I’ve always been a reader. I am superbly content when engrossed in a book. A great writer will take me along for the ride. I’ll feel for the characters and be affected by the story. Sometimes what I’ve read has me thinking about it days after I finished the last chapter.

Several of my favourite authors are fiction writers. I’ve been reading John Grisham since I was in primary school and my grandmother introduced me to Agatha Christie. Jeffrey Archer, regardless of his own drama, knows how to tell a story. This week I read his new book in one sitting. I literally couldn’t put it down.

Sometimes I just want to be entertained and books such as Harry Potter, or dare I admit it, Twilight, do that. Oh there was that one time 50 Shades of Grey was the only English book at the station in Prague, and well, after you’ve read the first one…

But for every fictional story that’s captured my imagination, a true story – a biography, a memoir, a collection of essays – has captivated, inspired and motivated me.

This year, I’m travelling the world.

The first travel memoir that stuck with me was Joe Bennett’s Where Underpants Come from: From Checkout to Cotton Field – Travels Through the New China.

There are 6.5 billion people in the world. Line them up as on a parade ground, then inspect them like a commander in chief. Roughly every hundredth person you pass will be British. Every fifteen-hundredth or so will be a New Zealander. Every fifth will be Chinese.

Officially China has 1.3 billion citizens. Actually it has rather more, perhaps as many as 1.6 billion. That’s as near as makes no difference a quarter of the world’s population. It’s also five times as many people as America’s got.

Having gone to the trouble of gathering 6.5 billion people into one place, do another little exercise. Ask all the farmers to step forward, the people who make their living by tilling soil or tending livestock. Of those, one in three will be Chinese.

Dismiss the people and line up the world’s pigs. I have no statistics on British or Kiwi pigs, but every second pig in your line will be Chinese. China produces 49 per cent of the world’s pork and eats the lot. The figure for ducks is even more impressive, but they’re harder to line up.

– Joe Bennett

That remark about the ducks still makes me chuckle. The book was an entertaining account of Bennett’s attempt to trace the origin of the undies he bought in New Zealand. I’d travelled to China a couple of years before I read this, but found myself back there again. He saw so much in that country that I’d missed, even when it was all around me.

A couple of years ago I discovered a beautiful copy of High Adventure, Edmund Hillary’s account of climbing Mt Everest, on a messy table at a school fair. Not long before that I’d read Jeffrey Archer’s Paths of Glory, which is inspired by the suggestion that Hillary wasn’t the first to reach the summit of Everest. (It was actually in the mountaineering section of a second-hand bookstore I visited a few weeks ago, which is a hugely controversial call by the shop owner.) Intrigued to read an accurate story about such an adventure I bought the book for 50c and joined Hillary on the South Col.

This year I discovered some of the big names in travel writing. I’m not going to go into why it took me so long because I just don’t know. I write this blog because I love writing, I love travel and I love sharing my experiences, but I may as well be scrawling “Megan waz ‘ere” compared to the real travel writers out there.

Somehow this year I also fell into stories of Arabia, and my bookshelf now holds the words of Wilfred Thesiger and Freya Stark.

The #travelbookclub led me to Paul Theroux. The #travelbookclub was formed after Emily-Ann Elliott (@grownupgapyear), Rachel Davis (@vagabondbaker), Jessica Crisp (JessicaRose_91) and I (@pegsontheline) bonded over a mutual love of books and travel during a discussion on Twitter.

We started with Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and I finished it in awe at the power of Theroux’s storytelling. I had a similar feeling after spending a couple of days in bed with Eric Newby’s book A Small Place in Italy.

There’s a strong argument that reading about travel is nothing compared to actually travelling. But to think of all the things I could have seen and done in the many thousands of hours I’ve spent reading is missing the bigger picture.

Reading about travel has made me a better traveller.

I’ve loved the details of the people and places and moments described by Hillary, Theroux and Newby and it inspired me to look closer for those details when I travel. They are there.

I admire the bravery and courage of Thesiger and Stark. I will never attempt a quest as pioneering (I doubt there are any adventures left in the world in the same league as what they achieved) but I will have my challenges.

Travel doesn’t have to always involve going somewhere. Sometimes you can see, learn and experience just as much by letting a great writer take you there.

Now if you’ll excuse me. Eric Newby and I are about to leave the station.

This month #travelbookclub is reading The Painter of Shanghai. Feel free to read along and join us for the discussion on June 5, 9pm GMT.

What’s your favourite travel book?