BootsnAll Travel Community

I have been busily reading a newish travelogue, entitled " Stalking the Wild Dik-Dik: One Woman's Solo Misadventures Across Africa " and written by Marie Javins.

Marie Javins is a keep observer of traveling and she writes very, very well. She travels as many of us here do and faces many of the same dilemmas that we face ("are folklore shows a bunch of hooey?"). As an added plus, she deals with annoying touts with admirable finesse. I highly recommend this book.

On another website, a group of us have been "interviewing" the author and asking all sorts of questions.

You may eavesdrop on this interview here.

Marie was one of our original travelogue authors on BnA. Great to see she's still travelling and writing.

Here's her South East Asia on a Hamstring stories.

I read a great deal of Marie's journal and found it to be rather less than satisfying. I admired her sense of adventure and that she set herself such an interesting task. She does an excellent job of describing the "job" of traveling. The ins and outs of getting from one place to another.

What I wanted from Marie, what I want from all travel writing, is a sense of place and person. I never got a feel for where she was or for the people who lived there. Each of her encounters with locals, except for her time in Mongolia, seemed to be all about getting services. She may have had lots of interaction with locals but it didn't come across in her entries. She also never gave me a sense of her surroundings. While I was fascinated by her train travel in China and admire greatly her ability to sleep under the most strained circumstances, what was going on outside of the train? What kind of terrain were they traveling through? Did she see any birds or animals? Well, no, because she was reading a book. Of course there's nothing wrong with reading the book, especially on a long train trip. But, dang it, I want the local color before she escapes.