Into Thin Air<\/a>) which fully relates what happens on high mountains when the shit hits the fan. Even the strongest die. Climbing mountains always makes for interesting reading because of the logistics of it, the physical hardships, the beauty of the mountains and the very pointlessness of it, and of course the danger. Mark does witness someone die on the mountain and he does spend his share of time staring at his toes while climbing slowly in his own world of pain, but he’s fit and strong and naturally optimistic and this makes for good mountaineering reading.<\/p>\nOn The Road<\/b><\/p>\n
The mountains make up a small but important quantity of the book. The rest is spent on the road with Mark as he traverses the Americas. The real interest in this for me is when in Central and South America. The North American culture is one we know well, being so similar to our own, but you cross a little line from the USA to Mexico and suddenly everything shifts in a weird and inexplicable way. (How can one border make so much difference?)<\/p>\n
Always when I read of people travelling through poor countries I wonder about the level of hospitality there. I’m sure as hell not welcoming perfect strangers back to my house for the night but in Central and South America they do. They house them, they feed them and they stock their bags with food for the next day. Reading accounts like this always make me reflect on my own behaviour (but inevitably don’t change it, I’m not naive enough to bring smelly backpackers into my house) and whether there is something to be envied (but probably not aspired to) in real poverty. (Yes, until you get a toothache or develop prostate cancer and there is no help available.)<\/p>\n
Many of the accounts of interactions with the locals are quite mundane, and you wonder why those got included and not others, but they are nevertheless interesting and of often humorous. I suppose in a way it is these mundane interactions that provide the real interest, it’s these that give you an insight into the countries and people he passes through. I imagine also that true travel is less full of exciting highlights (like climbing mountains) and more full of the banal, or at least my travel is, the sort of encounters that make for fun anecdotes rather than gripping recountings of adventure. I’m comfortable with the pace and style of the book, but then again the pace in which I consumed the book was somewhat pedestrian. My bite sized consuming of the book did allow for at most one or two anecdotes per reading, which gave me time to properly digest those anecdotes and of course bore my wife by relaying each and every one to her. “Hey, I just read in this book…”<\/p>\n
The Prologue<\/b>
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If you like a travel book or an adventure book then here you have a combo of the two. It’s a book about travel neatly book-ended by two <\/b>adventures. That for me was personally a good compromise. As I said earlier, I like my travel writers to take the burden out of the journey for me, and adventures are by their very nature uncomfortable and wearisome, so adventure books can harp on the negative a little much at time. On the other side travel writing can be a little bit same-same and if you’re not prepared to shift down into the tempo of the travel you can lose interest. This book is a book about cycling travel but with two adventures thrown in. It’s not a perfect balance but it’ll certainly do for a read.<\/p>\n
And of course, Mark completed his journey with several cameras, a computer and a satellite phone, so there is plenty of video footage and a blog for you to get into. I’ll leave you with another snippet from the man at the Beeb.<\/div>\n