About Travel Writing

Maybe modern day books like "One for the Road" can be called travel journals, but I'm not sure. Something has changed. The age of the classical travel journal seems to have passed.

Marco Polo had an easy job amazing his temporary Europeans with tales from the Far East. He mentions a place "so far to the North that the Polar star shines from the south", and he talks about a forest inhabited by myriads of unicorns. To us these claims are clearly just lies. Back in his time, however, although many doubted him, no one could prove him wrong.

Likewise, few questioned the "slightly biased" reports given by early jungle-bound Europeans who wrote home about the pure, godless evils of cannibals and head-hunters hiding deep in the green wilderness. Even our own grandparents willingly brag about the dangerous odysseys they went through just to get to school. Oh, the beauty of accounts that cannot be verified!

Today, however, a trip to remote regions is no longer just for reckless people who are willing to risk their lives to experience something different. Pretty much anyone with four weeks to spend can find out for themselves what life is like at the Mount Everest Base Camp. On any given day in January there are almost as many American and European retirees on the beaches of Antarctica as there are penguins. Even Outer Space receives its share of flabby, filthy rich tourists these days.

Hence, a travel journal today must do something more than to astound, to glorify and to mystify. Instead the writing must be both informative and entertaining, and it must just as much take the reader on a journey through the author's mind as through the locations he or she visits. If it leads to a more wide-spread understanding of the world still being a diverse and place full of problems that needs to be solved, that's excellent.

To achieve this understanding, the author must travel at a slow pace, much like the way young and well-off Europeans did when they sought out formative travel experiences a century or two ago. Their mission was to familiarize themselves with the foundations of their culture, and they did this by going to historical places around the Mediterranean Sea.

The difference between then and now is that we can and must do better. It is no longer enough to visit the places that shaped our civilization, to where the old Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, French, and British performed their art and fought their wars. To see, describe and realize what we could have become, if history had played out differently, that is the challenge for modern day travel writers.

I put forward that travel writing has turned into a branch of philosophy, or at least that modern day travel book authors should try to dig deeper into what he or she sees than what has typically been the case until now.

My travels have gradually become a way to create some distance to my life at home. It's a space that lets me compare my everyday concerns with real problems, problems on a scale rarely seen in my own country.

It's a wake-up call to see a boy on a skateboard not because he thinks it's great fun, but because he lost his feet when he stepped on a land mine, and there just is no wheelchair for him. You learn something from going to a shop where loudspeakers are installed not to play sales-inducing muzak, but because they need to be able to inform customers that the price of bread has risen again, for the third time that day. It is scary to visit a region where 35 percent is not the share of the population who can't be bothered to vote, but how many of those between 14 and 30 years of age who are infected by HIV. In surroundings like that, you may discover that your worries are not really problems at all.

To those of us who live in one of the sweet spots of planet Earth, it's all too easy to think that it's other people's faults and our own merits that have made some places good and other places not so good. After having traveled a bit, I think the most important lesson I've learnt is this: Nothing in the world is fair, and just because some of us have won the lottery, it doesn't mean we can allow ourselves to ignore all the problems we don't encounter at home.

Although I certainly prefer a cheery tone and funny observations to tales of doom and gloom, I hope that travel writers now and in the future will point out this unfairness of the world to their readers. The world is becoming a smaller village every day, and we need to understand what goes on around the increasingly closer corner.

Both travel writing and journeys we make on our own can and should help us improve this understanding.

The Jotunheimen Pixel Trail

Hi to you all!

It took longer than usual to finish the photo set from the Jotunheimstien hike I did in July. You see, I've bought a new PC. And this PC is so fast that suddenly I find it worth the while to spend twice as long on tweaking every photo than what I did before. In addition to this, the new PC is so fast that it is more tempting to spend my days pretending to be a high-resolution rally car driver risking my virtual life on narrow roads, than it is to entertain the world with my vacation photos.

But finally the photos are here. Or more specifically, here. I'm not so sure that all of them are worth the 3-4 kilometres I on average had to walk to get them, but I supposed they will have to do. In many ways it was a nicer trip than I had expected it to be, and suddenly I'm in better shape than I've been in for a long time. Which is good, of course.

These days I'm working again, and I don't know neither when nor to where my next trip will take me. But I promise you one thing: Wherever I'll be going next, I'll go there by motorized means, and not on foot! #8D)

Mission accomplished!

Somehow I seem to have completed my hike! I'm not sure how it happened, but after 11 walking days I found myself at Lake Gjende and the end of the looong trail. Hopefully more memories from this epic walk will come back to me as I go through the photos from the trip, but judging from the appearance of my feet, I think it's safe to say that it was a tough walk.

I was this happy to arrive:
Unfortunately, that's all I can show you here. It's so hot in Oslo now that I'm wearing an icebag on my head to survive. The combination of the amazingly long beard and the turban-like headwear makes me look like a, well, suspicious person, so since I may want to fly internationally again someday, I suppose it's best to not have that image of me floating around on the Internet. And I WILL fly internationally again. If this walk has taught me anything, it's that distances of more than 300 kilometers should not be walked!

I'll be back with some photos from the trip soon. I just wanted to tell you all that I'm alive. #8D)

See you!

Oh dear...

Yup.

I've just grown a new layer of skin to replace the lost bits from my last hike, and if I kick my big toe against something hard, it's almost as if I've regained some of the feeling inside it. So I guess it's time to head for the woods again. Lots of path left to do before I reach the Jotunheimen National Park.

The weather forecast is excellent, so I hope to reach Kittilbua, a place just north of Lillehammer, by the weekend that comes. To increase my chances, I've filled my backpack more sensibly this time. I took out some of the biggest books from last time, and I'm packing food for just 4 days. (And chocolate for a week, of course.) And as if that wasn't enough, I've even trimmed my toenails, and I've been to the hairdresser and cut down a bit on the hair on and near the top of my head.

This means I won't be around to answer any e-mails the coming week. Google.com will try to fill in for me, so head over there if there's anything you wonder about.

See you in a hundred miles or so!

Bjørn

Travels in the Interior of Africa

In 1799, Scottish explorer Mungo Park wrote a book with the same title. I read it before going to The Gambia in November 2007. Its description of the lack of resources in the country made me prepare for my trip by adding somewhat to my body mass. The book also offered some practical advice. I would apparently be wise to "bring lots of guns and ammunition", and I should avoid camping near the natives. Not an easy task in Africa's smallest country.

Of course, much has changed during the two centuries since Mr. Park visited, but if you want to leave the hotel strip on the coast, visiting The Gambia can be quite strenuous, even today. "Come and mostly enjoy our edible foods", reads a restaurant advertisement in Banjul, the Gambian capital. Well put, I have to say.

Banjul can be a scary place to visit, especially after dark. Not because of the crime rate. The man in absolute charge of the country for the last decade and a half, President Jammeh, knows that if people had weapons, they would use them on him. So as a tourist, there's not much reason to fear the people of Gambia. Unfortunately, due to poverty and a limited supply of electricity, after dark in Banjul really means in the dark. Add open sewers to that, and you get a city where walking around at night can be rather risky.

I decided to leave the capital and go up the river. There was no public transportation by boat available, so this meant I had to travel by car. I spent two full days doing so, although I wasn't actually moving for more than about six or seven hours. This took me just 120 kilometers inland, but it left me feeling as if I had crossed the continent. And I was a world away from the tourist beaches on the coast. The journey didn't cost much, apart from some blood, sweat and tears - and lots and lots of patience.

From Banjul, you first have to go to Bundung Garage in Serrekunda. There are no scheduled buses in The Gambia, hence there are no bus terminals either. Instead they have bush taxis. These vehicles are usually in a condition that makes it sensible to call the place where their passengers can find them, "Something Garage". You have to be there early in the morning because that's when the bush taxis leave. I wasn't going very far (by any non-Gambian standards), so I figured that leaving around noon would be suitable. I was wrong.

At the garage, I found a 30-seat vehicle waiting for more passengers. The driver needed an additional 25 before he would find it environmentally or, more probable, economically sensible to set off. One hour later we were still 25 short. I sort of gave up on getting anywhere that day, but I stayed put. In a poor country like The Gambia, you can't really comfortably walk around and look at how people live. But you can sit and wait for a bus that will never leave, and simultaneously look at how people live.

I was the only ghost face around, and the locals found much entertainment in me. They kept pointing at me and telling funny facts about foreigners to each other. The children would sneak up on me and caress the "fur" on my forearms. To many of them I must have been the first monkey man they could experiment with at such close range. I guess evolution long ago removed all heat-inducing mechanisms, including body hair, from the Gambian gene pool.

The driver spent the day sitting in the shadow of his car, chatting, drinking hot tea and smoking marijuana. His name was Sambo Dumbo, and I'm not even making that up!

Among my co-waiters were two old women who were coughing in a most tuberculous way. In the end I concluded that getting in that car would probably kill me one way or the other. So I didn't. Instead, I went back to the beach for a late afternoon swim, and I promised myself to get up earlier the next day.

This worked out well. When I returned at dawn, the car was still there, but the driver had been replaced with a more sober one. The two old women had probably died during the night. At least they were gone. At eight o'clock we had a full car and got going. That's when I discovered that the ticket was cheap enough that I could have bought all the tickets the day before and had the bus take off whenever I wanted to. Of course, demonstrating my relatively speaking insane economical powers like that, would not be to show good manners.

We drove for a full three minutes before the driver stopped at another garage. Our tires desperately needed more air. I'm not entirely sure why he couldn't have arranged that during the day and a half he had been waiting for passengers, but there may well have been a good reason for it. Maybe. Then we drove for another five minutes before we stopped for fuel. For the rest of the drive, we also stopped every thirty minutes or so, to fill up on water for the car radiator. I'm not complaining, mind you. I'm just saying that going by bush taxi in The Gambia isn't necessarily a quick way to get around.

In some countries, the traffic is so bad that your chances of survival are best if you sit in the back of any moving vehicle. In The Gambia, I figured I would be better off bribing the driver with a dollar or so to get the seat next to him. That's the only way I could have a good view of what went on outside. It was completely safe. The driving was so slow that there was no risk of a collision with anything bigger than a snail.

That said, we DID drive off the road more or less all the time. But that was just because ironically, the road conditions were most of the time better there than on the actual road. It's just ridiculous how bad the roads are in The Gambia. The only place a pedestrian there can feel safe is in the craters in the middle of the roads! Gambian stray dogs seemed to know this. They spent their days sleeping on the road, waiting for night to come, when they would wake up and start their tireless howling.

Anyway, I sat in the front where I could see what The Gambia was like. It's a flat country. All I saw was what was on or right next to the road, which wasn't much. At least I learned that most people appeared to spend their days sitting in the shadows of trees, scowling at the occasional passing car that showered them in a red cloud of dirt and sand. The locals weren't difficult to cheer up, though. All I had to do was look like a badly sunburned whitey and wave at them, and they would immediately beam their white teeth in a smile back at me.

The numerous police and roadside soldiers didn't smile much. Typically because it had been seventeen months or something like that since the President last paid them their salary. They did, of course, need some money to survive, so they cashed in on just about every vehicle that passed by. They didn't want much, but they took their time getting it. It seriously delayed our progress.

I had been warned about this, so I had brought some small notes to pay the various fines I was given. The crimes I committed ranged from sitting with my backpack in my lap to not being able to explain exactly which coastal village in northern Norway I had been born in. Soon I didn't bother with putting away my passport and my yellow fever vaccination card, as I was asked to show them at every stop we were forced to make.

I soon was taught not to photograph anyone wearing a uniform. They're not that photogenic anyway, but the main reason to refrain from doing so, the driver told me, was that I risked being arrested. Apparently, taking photographs of the police is what a spy will do. And although I can't imagine why a spy would photograph the slumbering, corrupt police of The Gambia, this would probably not keep me out of jail. And there are better ways to spend your time in The Gambia than in one of the local jail cells. On the other hand, there are certainly worse alternatives as well, but I'll save that for another story.

Briefly, a relatively short ride in a Gambian bush taxi can be quite eventful, in an extremely slow kind of way. I do recommend it, at least as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

If you want to see more photos and read about travelling in The Gambia and Senegal, please visit my West Africa gallery.

(This article is my own work, and it featured on the Boots'n All Web site in May 2008.)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Without a Backpack

Ah! One week after returning from the first leg of my walk to the mountains, I still very much enjoy being at home. It's not quite as wonderful as the first few seconds after you take off your heavy backpack, when you positively feel that you need to hold on to something in order not to float up towards the sky and disappear. But it's really, _really_ nice to be home, where all kinds of everyday luxuries are within my grasp at any time.

Anyway, on the map to the right you can see how far I've made it:

So there's plenty of walking left to do, and I will do it as soon as the weather forecast promises at least five days in a row with no rain.

While I'm waiting, I'm working on some writing and I've prepared the photographs from the trip. Feel free to have a look. Please note how I'm transformed between photos 1 and 45, from being a walking deodorant commercial into a sweaty bastard with no will to live. Highly entertaining, in retrospect.

I hope you all enjoy your summer as much as I do!

Will I ever walk again?

Like a normal human being, I mean. Or should I just resign to the fact that my theme song from now on will be Genesis' "I can't dance" ("I can't dance, I can't talk. Only thing about me is the way I walk.")? Here's how I've gotten around during the last couple of days:

1. From a sitting position on the ground, I put my feet together with the weight on the outside of my soles. Pushing hard with my hands I get into a crouching position, from where I whimper as I slowly straighten my body upwards.

2. Slowly, slowly, I distribute my weight across the full area of the soles of my feet. It hurts tremendously!

3. For about ten steps I stagger ahead like a very old man (I would say like an 80 years old man, but that would be an insult to the 81-year-old who swiftly walked past me in the woods two days ago) on his way towards his walking aid.

4. After ten seconds or so, some kind of internal painkiller system kicks in, and I can almost start walking like I used to, you know, back when I had not yet started on this hike. If I stop for a few seconds, though, the pain is back, after which I'm likely to start shouting bad words at the innocent trees around me.

Anyway, due to bad weather, a desperate need of a camera battery recharge, many lessons learned about efficient packing AND, I'll admit, some minor body malfunctions (see above), I've taken a break from my hike. At a spot about 120 kilometers into the 320 kilometer walk, I was just five kilometres away from public transportation that could take me back home. It was a most convenient place to take a break.

It's been a great hike this far, and I've learned a lot from it:

* Anyone voluntarily going on a hike like this must either be mad, in absolutely superb shape, or not at all have understood what lies ahead of them. Hundreds of miles/kilometers of walking through what is basically wilderness is durn hard work!

* Efficient packing is crucial when you have to carry on your back everything you need for a number of days. I'm still no expert, but I've learnt a thing or two by now. For instance, there's no point in carrying several bricks made of paper that you intend to read before you go to sleep in the evening. What happens as soon as you've put up your tent and eaten your dinner is that you collapse into unconsciousness inside your sleeping bag.

* July may not be the best month for multi-day hikes in the forests of southern Norway. Most of the snow in the mountains has melted already, and there's little rain. This means it can be difficult to find streams with potable water. It's fairly warm weather, so you may have to carry a LOT of water on your back. Or you have to resort to drinking Chateaux de Lemmingcorpse or Eau de Shit de Sheep, i.e. brownish marsh water. (Not recommended.)

* Usually when vampire bats attack in the middle of the Norwegian woods with a loud shriek, they're not really vampire bats at all, but just the mattress I carry on top of my backpack, scratching a branch that hangs across the path.

All this is valuable pieces of information that I will find great use of as soon as I return to my walk in the woods in a few days (hopefully).

Happy trails!

Bjørn

Does the Bear shit in the woods?

Well, not right now but apparently I'm soon going to. (To any new readers; my name, Bjørn, translates to Bear in English. *Growl*)



Yep. I'll walk that thin, red line on the map. I'm not sure how far it is, but when a walk is visible on a map of that scale, you just know there will be some blisters involved. I'll begin in downtown Oslo, and if everything goes way better than expected, two weeks or so later I may be in Jotunheimen National Park, "The Realm of the Giants", in the mountainous middle of Norway.

The first half is basically a walk in the woods. Do read Bill Bryson's masterpiece from a similar journey to understand what I may experience there. Then there's a road to be crossed, and if I'm not run over by a car then, the second half will be a walk in the mountains. I expect to see more elks and reindeer than people during this trip. I also expect to smell more like an elk than like a human being by the end of the walk.

So, why would anyone in their right mind do something like this? Well, don't ask me! But personally I do it mainly for these reasons;

1. To figure out whether I actually can do it. If so, there's a number of similar walks in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Nepal and elsewhere I'd really like to put myself through.

2. To tremendously enjoy returning home afterwards. Being deprived of all kinds of luxuries that just don't fit into a backpack for a while, makes you appreciate them so much more when you regain access to them.

3. To eat at least five kilograms of chocolate in the month following my return, without experiencing any feelings of guilt whatsoever!

A complete lack of Internet access is only one of the many qualities of Norwegian wilderness I will enjoy while I'm out there. Hence there will be no blogging from the backwoods. I'll try to make up for it when I return. If I return.

Happy trails!

Bjørn

Ps: Here's a more detailed map, so you know where to look for me in the unlikely event that I decide to settle down somewhere along the route:

Maltastic!

So, since my last blog entry, I've visited Malta. Which was nice, and I have the photos to prove it.
I'll post a full review of the trip sooner or later, but let me just say that Malta isn't the most exciting country I've visited. It's so tiny that I walked across it several times, sometimes not even on purpose. This is not a bad thing in itself, but when you add four hundred thousand inhabitants to it, it gets sort of crowded. Which is not good, in my book.

I figured it might be a Gibraltar-like place. You know, a distinctly British heritage, English spoken everywhere, a piece of Northern Europe, only with palm trees. But it isn't. Instead it's a strange mix of Arab and Italian culture, and the locals don't speak much English unless it is to give directions to a silly tourist. And the names of places are so far away from English as they possibly could.

You may very well finding yourself being a silly tourist asking a local how you can get to the corner of Ix-Xatt Ta'Xbiexi and Triq Gorg Borg Olivier. Oh, and there's a dot over the g's, which means they're not really g's either. Good luck. Fortunately the country is so small that even when you go to the wrong place, you'll be quite close to where you meant to be anyway.

I'll just add that if you go there: Beware of the Kinnie! Maybe I'll explain why later, but for now, enjoy the photos!

On going solo

The following useful article is more or less an excerpt from my book One for the Road. It's a travel book intended to be read as a novel, although there's also lots of useful information for travelers in it.

Fate sometimes hands out a chance to carry out your travel dreams. Maybe you finish school and land a job set to begin a few months into the future. Or maybe you work in a company that struggles to survive, and suddenly one day you're offered financial compensation if you're willing to leave your job. Perhaps you inherit some money. No matter how it happens, suddenly you have the opportunity to leave home for a while, and you know that it's now or never.

Unfortunately, when opportunity knocks like that, it often does so only for you, and not for those of your friends who you might have preferred to share the experience with. So you have to choose. Are you going on your own, or will you stay at home and buy yourself a new couch instead?

There's an easy answer to that question. Especially if you ask others what they think you should do. Your friends envy you because you can do something they can't. Besides, they like to have you around, they don't want you to leave and be gone for a long time. And your family don't want you to end your days inside an anaconda or beheaded in a ditch somewhere in foreign parts where dangerous stuff like that probably happens all the time. Suspecting that you may regret this some day, not next week, but in ten years or so, you end up going to IKEA instead of to Guinea. And you will regret it.

Of course, in many ways it is better to travel with someone, I won't even bother with listing the arguments supporting that view. But before you cancel your travel plans just because you don't have anyone to go with, you should know that starting on a journey alone doesn't mean that you will stay alone while on the road. Backpackers are gregarious animals. They embark upon new friendships as soon as the opportunity presents itself. And it does. All the time.

Sleeping in dormitories automatically lead to conversations with those you share a room with. If you go on day trips organized by the hostel you stay at, before the day is over you will have as many new friends as there are seats in the minibus used for the trip. Or more.

Should you ever find yourself completely bewildered at a bus station in Syktyvkar, Pokhara, Cuzco, Cairns or Kampala, soon enough there will be two of you, and the most natural thing in the world for you both will be to start talking and help each other solve the mystery of the lost ticket office. It's more than likely that you're both heading in the same direction. If not, you will still meet again four weeks later with a hug on a street corner in Hanoi. This, in turn, will lead to annual Christmas cards and a free couch to stay on in London two years later. Maybe you marry the person. Nobody knows what putting a backpack on and traveling the world may lead to. As long as you stay on or near the backpacker highways, loneliness will simply not be an option.

Should you ever feel lonely, just get on a bus!

If one of your reasons for traveling is to meet new people, you should definitely travel alone. Maybe you're not the most extrovert person at home, where you have your friends, family and daily tasks to rely on. That doesn't mean much. When you travel on your own in foreign countries, you'll be surprised by how easily you start talking to strangers. Really. Because that's what humans are designed to do. You may just have to get away from your sheltered home to discover it.

Another bonus is all the time you save when you travel without company. Expect a significant decrease in the number of hours spent waiting for someone to finish in the bathroom, buying fridge magnets or new clothes. Those hours are instead yours to spend on doing exactly what you want to the most. Enjoy!

Your gender doesn't change any of this. Many countries and regions, actually most of them, are as safe to travel in as your home ground. You should take the same precautions everywhere, whether you're at home or traveling. Look after yourself and follow the advice you get from guidebooks and from everyone you meet on your way.
Sometimes, even when it's safe to travel alone, you may need someone to travel with to share the cost of hiring a car and a driver, or something like that. When this happens, just post a note on a hostel notice board. Write where and when you would like to go and include some information about who you are. Or you can simply get in touch with someone who already has put up a note.

If you want to be absolutely certain that you won't be traveling alone, there's a wide range of tour operators that are more than willing to help you. "Overland tours" and other expeditions by bus along popular backpacker routes can get you many places, and they will probably offer you more company than you really need. Still, too much is maybe better than nothing, so there you go.

These tour operators will let you spend weeks or months on tours with intriguing names like "The Great Andean Adventure", "Surf & Drink Australia" or "The Silk Road in a Pink Bus". You pay more than you would have if you traveled on your own, but in return you don't have to plan or arrange anything yourself. On the bus you meet lots of people. Some you will like, some you won't, and you will probably not have to be alone for a second throughout the whole trip.

If you're not quite brave enough to travel on your own, a trip like that can be an excellent way to get your life as a traveler started. You will see most of what the brochures promise, and there's no doubt that you will have some great experiences. What you don't get is the freedom to stay longer in the places you fall in love with. You will miss that freedom. Often. Still, if your alternatives are either to travel with a group like that or not to travel at all, go with the group!