4 comments about Eyewitness Travel Guide to South Africa (revised).

1. These series of books are nothing less than excellent. The combination of photos, maps and suggestions for sightseeing are top notich. They never steer you wrong - and help to make either a quick trip or extended stay worthwhile. The suggestions for sights are both the "tourist" places and some off the beaten paths. This book is a must for any traveler to South Africa, or any of the other locations you may be traveling.



2. It is amazing how you can live in a country and never see it all. This book made me quite homesick since South Africa was my home for 12 years. My parents moved there when I was just seven and I did not return to America until I was getting ready to attend college.
   
   I can truly say, South Africa is perhaps one of the most beautiful countries in the world. The land seems to burst with color, the scent of the earth is intoxicating, the animal life is vibrant and the sunsets....are well...magnificent. This book brings South Africa to life in all her glory. Upon opening this book you will find a map of all the regions. I lived near Johannesburg for most of my life, but we also traveled to Durban and the Cape for vacations in the summer. December in South Africa is quite warm and is holiday season. Each year we would travel down to Durban on our annual pilgrimage to the beach. Oh, the beaches. What can I say? I cannot say enough about them. The sand is hot, the breezes are warm and the water can be dangerous to play in, yet the swimming there is the best I have ever experienced. You can feel the power of the earth so much more fully in Africa. The earth captures your heart.
   
   The plant life is also displayed in this book. Namaqualand with its dwarf shrubs and daisy-like pink vygie blossoms are presented so beautifully. South African Architecture is so beautiful and I remember being mesmerized by the paintings on the walls as we would drive by the thatch covered houses. Cape Dutch, Georgian and Victorian Architecture is also shown. The History of South Africa and the story of the Apartheid years is interesting for those who would like to read up on the background of this country.
   
   If you go to South Africa, you will not want to miss Table Mountain, The Garden Route, Namaqualand, the Cango Caves, Durban, Gold Reef City, Pretoria (where I used to buy great curry powder and now buy it online) and The National Parks (where we rolled down the window and scared my mom half out of her mind because lions were close by).
   
   If you want to know where to stay, there is a whole list of places. The index is extensive. I would recommend a tour. With this book, you can find out which places you would most like to visit.
   
   If you are heading to South Africa, I am very jealous and I must say...I was on lucky person to have been able to live there for 12 years! This book made me terribly homesick for my childhood home. When my father first went to Africa he fell in love with the country and returned years later with us tagging along. I thank him for giving us this amazing opportunity to experience a completely different culture. This book will also put to bed the myths that South Africa is a backwards country. It is very modern and is extremely beautiful.
   
   Sigh.....I really miss living there. It is a good thing I found a company that sells all the great food products we used to buy there online called Protea Imports. It still doesn't make up for fresh fruit off the tree in your backyard, or a walk in the veld or a swim the warm ocean. You won't regret buying this book or visiting South Africa. I hope to one day show my husband this land that I love. I think he needs to take me on a vacation!
   
   ~The Rebecca Review



3. This book is great to look at, but that's as far as it goes. I know a picture says a thousand words, but not in this book. For a person travelling to a country for the first time, I want to know as much information as possible about each place that I may go. This book only briefly covers the big cities and main "tourist" places, which is a shame because there are many tourist places that are not even mentioned. There is no guide to the animals you could see when on safari or drive by on a tour. Kwa-Zulu Natal should not be referred to as Zululand due to the Theme Park feel it gives to the traditions of a culture. I found that I used other people's Lonely Planet and Let's Go! guides and after awhile I took this guide out of my day pack.



4. This travel guide has many beautiful photos. However, the over 400 pages of information is in small type that is somewhat impractical. The travel guide is set up in 15 sections. The sections are:
   
   1. Cape Town
   2. Cape Winelands
   3. Western Coastal Terrace
   4. Southern Cape
   5. Garden Route to Grahamstown
   6. Wild Coast, Drakensberg and Midlands
   7. Durban and Zululand
   8. Gauteng and Sun City
   9. Blyde River Canyon and Kruger
   10. South of the Orange
   11. North of the Orange
   12. Where To Stay
   13. Where To Eat
   14. Practical Information
   15. Travel Information

No comments about Cape Town (Hoberman Photographic Collection).

No comments about Travels In West Africa.

5 comments about Okavango: Africa's Last Eden.

1. This book makes me suspect that Frans Lanting is not only the worlds greatest wildlife photographer but also the greatest bird photographers, crocodile photographer, elephant photographer etc. As usual, his photography is far from the species type of photography often seen. Lanting connects with the subject and transform the experience into art. In addition, he is not afraid to break the rules and make it work. The book is a must in any nature photographers library.



2. As other Lanting books, attitude is all, from cover to cover



3. Mr. Lanting is a unique and wonderful photographer who is a great help to all of us. His photos capture the wildlife of the Okavango as they are -- not postcard photos. He has a respect and reverence of this fragile ecosystem (unlike none other in the world) and all that lives and dies there that is captured in this book. Botswana is a special country with a unique ecosystem in the Delta that you should travel to. I've had the good fortune to experience Africa eight times, Botswana twice. I will return many times to the Delta as there is so much there to experience and each time its fresh. Let Mr. Lantings photos pursuade you to go.



4. This is a terrific book to learn more about this region. I can't recommend the book enough. The photography is stunning and the narrative is just right. I only wish it didn't end.



5. Frans Lanting had created marvelous book. His pictures portray the unique beauty of the region, convey the wildness of a place, and force a viewer to visit the place immediately. The photographs and text also urge the people to save this unique ecosystem. We realize the impact of water on the unique environment of the delta that supports the greatest variety of the flora and fauna in the world. At the same time these photographs make us realize what will be lost if the water will be gone. This book has inspired me even more after I visited the Okavango delta. It made me to relive my own experiences once again. After more than 5 years of its publication, this book is still the best pictorial work on Okavango delta. Simply, the greatest!

No comments about The Flying Carpet.

No comments about Insight Guide Gambia & Senegal (Insight Guide Gambia and Senegal).

No comments about The Sad Story of Burton, Speke, and the Nile; or, Was John Hanning Speke a Cad: Looking at the Evidence.

5 comments about Across African Sand: Journeys of a Witch-Doctor's Son-in-Law.

1. I think that Phil Deutschle is a wonderful author, having to put up with all of that stress of how to fit in time to writ after or at the time of his experiences. And just being able to adapt to a community so quick ; but at the same time working.



2. I bought this book for my husband. While he was reading it he kept interrupting my reading to tell me about what was happening in his book. In self defense, I picked it up as soon as he finished and immediately found myself transported to Africa. This book is much more than the story of the author's trip across the Kalahri on a bicycle. He writes about the people he meets and tells of their culture, the politics and economy of each group. He possesses interpersonal skills that allow him to relate to all sorts of people quickly and he writes about them with affection and respect. He describes plant and animal life along the way. Through flashbacks he tells of his earlier life and recent experience as a teacher in Africa. During the lonely stretches of his trip he wonders about his need to wander the globe. My husband said when he finished the book, "I've learned more about Africa from this book than all of the other books on the subject, put together" I agree, and I learned a great deal about life in general and men in particular from it.



3. This portrait will also fit neatly in travel sections: itportrays a bicyclist's journey across two deserts as he bikes throughsand, dodging lions and elephants and visiting remote parts of outback Africa. The adventure and observations of life in Botswana make for an excellent and exciting read.



4. Across African Sand: Journey Of A Witch Doctor's Son-In-Law is the true life adventure story of Phil Deutschle's bicycle trip across 3,000 miles of African landscape. Along the way Phil was stalked by lions, charged by a herd of enraged elephants, fell in love with (and married) the daughter of a prominent witch doctor. Across African Sand is a compelling, engaging, fascinating biographical travelogue that relates an account of Phil's five years in Botswana (southern Africa) told in the form of flashbacks while he bicycles over the harsh Kalahari and Namib deserts, negotiating difficult African terrain, including soft sand and mud, during the course of his three month cycling adventure. Across African Sand is highly recommended for bicycling enthusiasts, armchair adventurers, and anyone who has ever yearned to travel the world, meet new people, and have adventures of their own!



5. Across African Sand is a an excellent example of what true adventure books should be. I emphasize the word "true" not simply to point out that events in the book are factual but to distinguish this work from books describing stunts. (To me a stunt is a once-in-a-lifetime event, filled with harum-scarum that a more skilled traveler would have avoided and usually detailing a significant departure from the main stream of the writer's life.) By contrast, Across African Sand comes across as the logical continuation of Phil Deutschle's career as a teacher and introspective traveler. Prior to embarking on his solo bicycle ride across the Kalahari and Namib deserts, Deutschle has spent three years living and teaching in an out-of-the way village in Botswana. An accomplished linguist, he has become fluent-to-conversant with several local languages, including that of the !Kung (Bushman) people, and thus we learn more of African life and thought than we would at the mercy of a more casual traveler. Deutschle clearly enjoys the company of the various people he falls in with along the way but also relishes the solitude which is such a significant part of his journey. Part of the success of the book is its skillful interweaving of events in the course of his cycling trek with flashbacks to his life as a teacher in a traditional Botswana village. Dimi Press has done a creditable job of putting the book together and its illustrations are great. I wholeheartedly recommend this as an interesting and insightful story of travel and adventure.

5 comments about The Language of the Land: Living Among a Stone-Age People in Africa.

1. Stephenson, a 27 year old landscaper from New York, spends 9 months with the Hadzabe tribe south of the Serengeti.. He describes this experience in a very honest way, and so we learn about these hunters in the bush: their dreams, their spirits, their hunting, their daily life and their families. It is a well rounded picture. He loves these gentle people and finds peace and quiet with them. But he admits that he never learned their language and, of course, he always has his return ticket to New York.

   To call this adventure a retrogression in time towards stone age people would be quite wrong. The Hadzabe are well connected to civilization. They drive by car to the local hospital. They steal radios. They sell their hunting trophies for money, go to the village bar and get stoned on pombe. They wear western clothes and hunt at night with a flashlight. But they prefer their life in the bush, and that is the difference.

   The book has many pictures and drawings. It is a nice adventure story.




2. Stephenson's memoir about the Hadzabe in Tanzania, one of the last tribes of hunter-gatherers, is fascinating, though not always in ways the author probably intended. As much about the 27-year-old author and the casual romanticism with which he plunges into life in another culture as it is about the death throes of a Stone Age tribe being overtaken by "progress," the author announces at the outset that this is "a journey greater than [him]self, a journey that has chosen [him]."
   
   Propelled initially by visions and fever dreams, New Yorker Stephenson, called "Jemsi" by the Hadzabe, participates in all phases of their lives--the hunting and gathering, the long, thirsty treks in the bush, the seemingly endless drinking of intoxicating pombe, the meals of everything from monkey brains to baboon marrow, and dangerous, unprotected sex with camp followers, who believe that baboon oil will protect them from AIDS.
   
   The reader cannot help but admire the gusto with which the author approaches this life, his genuine fear that this culture will soon die completely, and his reverence for their beliefs, their connection to the land, and their ancestors. But it's impossible also not to wonder about the authenticity of his observations when he is so often paying to accompany the Hadzabe in the bush, when it is his flashlight the Hadzabe sometimes use to blind the small antelope they kill and eat, and when so much of his knowledge seems to come from visions or in dreams.
   
   And he can always escape. During an uncomfortable time of heavy rains, he takes a vacation, flying to Zanzibar, where, he says, the "energy of the stars, the earth, the trees, the animals...all seemed to channel through me...I was creatively on fire and sexually out of control...The ancient man inside me had awakened and was struggling violently with the modern man," which sounds like a creative way of saying, "The devil made me do it."
   
   Stating in his preface that he "came to understand the importance of exaggeration...to create a more universal truth for the listening party," the author conveys his excitement in a skillful narrative, which often includes striking imagery: of elderly people entering the camp "like slow wakes in still water," and of walking "through the oracles of singing red birds." His visions, dreams, and psychic premonitions, however, may cause the reader to pause, wondering if they are part of the exaggeration he finds so important here. And there is unintended irony, with Nubea, an old Hadzabe, mournfully asking, "Why are the forests eaten by the corn and bean?" [p. 176] , while the author, just a few pages later [p. 185], admires the life of a friend in Zanzibar, stating, "One could definitely envy the family's way of life. They 'lived' life on a farm..." In this fascinating story about a modern young man's attempts to share an endangered life style, Stephenson raises as many questions as he answers. Mary Whiipple



3. Eat your heart out, D. H. Lawrence. Here is a young man who has lived the primitive life you extolled-- and writes about it like a dream. We Westerners are guilty of dismissing and destroying cultures we consider uncivilized, but the so-called primitive life also fascinates us. We see in it an unforced spirituality, and a deeper sense of communion with both nature and tribe--all the values we left behind in our race for more and bigger agriculture.

   Our ambivalence toward these emotions--what Marianna Torgovnick, professor and chair of the English department at Duke University, and author of "Primitive Passions" has called the "the sensation of merging with the universe"--is at the root of our fascination with the primitive. As D. H. Lawrence expressed it: "the human race is . . . like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe."

   This is what James Stephenson does. At age twenty-seven, this artist and landscape-builder wandered off into the African bush with little more than his paints and a pocketful of plastic snakes and spiders that his mother gave him (for practical jokes and to fend off beggars). He had visited the Hadzabe several times before, and intended to spend a year eating, drinking, hunting, and dreaming with them.

   He writes about the Hadzabe as though he had lived in a state of total realization with them. Somehow he managed to short-circuit all of the fears that would have kept me from abandoning the safety and comfort of civilization. But he also admits to the danger of becoming a free, primal man: "The mental discipline that makes one restrain his/her action in the present...was no longer functioning properly..." 'Future' was only a concept. He was no longer concerned about AIDS and sought multiple women for sexual pleasure. He went on drinking binges with his companions. He slept on the ground, endured mudslides, stinging insects, parasites, bad water and baby starlings for breakfast. Creatively, he was on fire.

   There is a hallucinatory quality in the images that this author employs, especially on his hunting trips with the Hadzabe men. He was also taken on two, longer journeys of the spirit to search for the mountain of Nudulungu (the Hadzabe Christ figure) and to pay homage to the rock paintings of the Hadzabe ancestors. These two journeys are the heart of this book, and also the heart of the Hadzabe, one of Africa's vanishing tribes who still live off of the land and the forest without the benefit (and curse) of agriculture.

   There are probably more elephants in Africa today than there are hunter-gatherers.

   One of the ironies of this book is that it is the Hadzabe who feed their farmer-neighbors in times of drought and famine and not the other way around.

   The author rarely resorts to anger or irony, but "The Language of the Land" is an elegy. His Hadzabe companions are brought to vivid life within the pages of this book, but even they know that they're probably the last of the men who will live in balance with the other life of the great African forests and savannahs.




4. What a wonderful book and to make it even better the CD of the music of the Hadzabe is now available. Produced in France, it can be found on Amazon.com. Titled "The Hadza Bushmen of Tanzania", the CD features recordings of the music as sung and played by the characters in James Stephenson's incredible book. You will recognize the photographs on the album cover as those from the book and recognize the musicians as the characters Stephenson introduces us to. There are songs and chants from around the camp fire, from rituals, hunting songs and the sounds of daily life. What a rare opportunity to glimpse an ancient way of life and experience its music before it is gone forever.



5. Do you like everything African? If so, this book is a must. I really enjoyed reading this book about an African tribe living in Tanzania, neat the famous Seregenti Wildlife Park. I was in Africa a few years ago and after reading this book, I can't wait to go back. You will love it. I also highly recommend this great book; "Dancing with the witchdoctor" by Kelly James.

No comments about Ismailia: A Narrative of the Expedition to Central Africa for the Suppression of the Slave Trade; Organized by Ismail, Khedive of Egypt. Volume 2.