Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #745852 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Marie Javins' Africa
Imagine the pleasure of opening your mailbox to find a whole stack of sequential letters from a friend traveling abroad: it would be impossible not to sit down and read them all at once. Marie Javins' writing is exactly like that. Possessing both talent and wit in abundance, Marie is the traveler most of us would like to be: fearless, easygoing, observant, and culturally wide-awake. Her writing is filled with easy, knowing humor, without the pretense of cleverness for cleverness' sake. Marie is at her best in this book portraying the boredom, fatigue, and frustration of travel in hot, dusty, crowded, and cramped trains, buses, and trucks as she makes her way across the African continent from Namibia to Egypt. Marie invites us to an Africa that is far from our popular imagination, yet even more intriguing - it should be mandatory reading for anyone considering travel there. Immersed, you feel like a familiar friend and travel companion as Marie shares her intimate thoughts and observations, and asks all the right questions about the people, diverse cultures, and animals she encounters. Her adventures and near-death experiences make for a thrilling read, and put to rest any fears that the great continent has been tamed.

Anyone who enjoys travel will enjoy this book - highly recommended.

Come along for a fun overland ride through Africa
The beauty of reading an account of a long overland journey is that you can live the experience through someone else, still enjoying your hot shower, comfy bed, and well-stocked pantry at home. Javins' book is one of those conversational, easy-reading tales that doesn't try to dazzle you with its erudite suppositions or try to make grand expositions on the nature of what's wrong with Africa. Instead there are just musings on impossible questions, such as "Should I be accepting personal responsibility for slavery, the price of coffee, and colonialism?"

The book mostly just goes for a long journey and takes you along for the ride: from Cape Town to Cairo via a meandering route up the east after heading through Botswana and Namibia. She admits that the first time she went to the continent it was just something to cross off a list: "Wash clothes. Buy toilet tissue. See Africa."

Javins' goal was to do it all without getting on a plane, as part of a round-the-world tour on the ground and water only. In the end she has to hop a flight from Sudan to Egypt to catch a freighter when, as expected, the schedule doesn't quite move as planned. The mishaps here are natural ones though, things that any traveler will encounter on the continent, with no scenes that make us feel as if the author was intentionally seeking out bad situations just to enliven the story. Of course the natural hurdles in Africa can be bad enough on their own. In this case it's a Namibian taxi driver who keeps nodding off at the wheel, a bus wreck in Ethiopia, and and enough scamster touts to fill a small city.

Despite the luxury camps and expensive safari trips Africa is known for, it is still a wild frontier for anyone trying to cross it by land and this book is a great way to figure out if you're up for it yourself. If you're not, you can ride along then go take a hot shower at home.

Writing like travel writing matters
Travel writing has been dragged down for 20 years now by the curse of Bruce Chatwin wannabes on fake quests (pogo stick around Mt. Fuji, etc.), Marie's book is a throwback to when people actually went somewhere to see what the place was like, instead of what their own ideas of the place were like. She travels wide open to the people and the scenery, and has written one of the only honest books about Africa I've ever read. Isabella Bird would be proud.