Travelling has always fascinated me, ever since I was young.
Being born and growing up abroad will do that to you – it gives you a greater sense
of awareness of the size and scale of the world. I didn’t return to the UK to
live permanently until I was nearly 7, and by this time I had already seen the
USA, Australia, Far East, Europe, The Pacific and South East Asia. That kind of
travelling at a young age almost always a great desire to do more as you get
older.
One thing I love almost as much as travelling is reading
about other people’s travels. I love reading and hearing other people’s
opinions of places I’ve been to – but I also love seeing new places and different
takes on things. Not everyone travels for the same reason and hence not
everyone experiences the same things at the same places. This variety has
always held an interest for me.
Bill Bryson is one of my favourite travel writers for a number
of reasons.
I love his style of travelling first and foremost. I’m very
much what I would call a “big ticket planner”. I like to have the big items
like travel and accommodation sorted in advance. Part of this is due to the
fact that, whilst I’m not exactly travelling on a shoestring, I don’t usually
have the funds or time to risk pitching up somewhere and not being able to find
anything except a £200pn room and a £1000 flight home!! I am then a bit freer
to explore the sights of somewhere, safe in the knowledge I know where I am
sleeping and where I’ll be heading next.
Bryson doesn’t do this. He has a vague plan but he travels
very much by the seat of his pants. Or seems to at least. Neither here nor there was written in the early 1990s and since
then there has been an explosion of backpacking and the like, maybe that was
the way people travelled back then and it simply doesn’t happen that much
anymore.
Regardless, his travel style allows him to see so much more
than the sights of a place – he can really get under the skin and understand
how places tick. The culture and the traditions of a place are often even more
fascinating than towering domes, huge gorges or architectural masterpieces.
This comes across in his writing style too. I find my travel
reviews tend to be very factual when I read them back, Bryson’s ebb and flow
and give you a real sense of what it was like being there – not just a list of
what to do and not to do. It is, I think, a difficult skill to master and one I
admire greatly and strive to emulate.
Neither here nor
there follows Bryson as he recreates (in his 40s) a journey he made when he
first arrived in Europe some twenty to thirty years previously. From the north
of Sweden down through Europe to Istanbul he follows his nose as he makes his
way around the diverse continent.
Part of the interest in this book is seeing how the
different parts of the continent have evolved at different speeds. This book is
probably 25 years old and yet, for example, Florence sounds pretty similar to
how I remember it (though I enjoyed it more than Bryson evidently did)! Yet
other places are unrecognisable compared to what they are now like.
The way Bryson shifts through the varying landscape, people,
languages and cultures is very symptomatic of how Europe used to be. The
Eurozone has, to some extent, created much more uniformity throughout the
continent – yet this book harks back to the “good old days” of having to change
currencies every time you crossed a border and having a passport full of
stamps.
Maybe that is some of the appeal of this book, a bygone era
unsaturated with the internet where if you wanted to see a place you had to go
and see it. Nowadays you can drop a little man into a street and see exactly
what the front door of your hotel looks like whereas 25 years ago you might
turn up in a city and have no idea which country even you were in.
The end result, for me, is a joy. From the many anecdotes,
some good and some bad, through some more sombre political and socio-economic
commentaries this book has everything a good travel book should have. And by
that I don’t mean a Rough Guide or a Lonely Planet (which have their merits I’ll
grant you).
I mean a REAL travel book, a book actually about travelling
the world and seeing the many sights and sounds it has to offer. Bryson does
this better than anyone and, 25 years on, this is still funny, insightful,
relevant and interesting. I can’t give much higher praise.
Verdict: Everything a travel book should be about. 5 stars of out 5
Till next time,
DT
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