3 comments about Moon Handbooks Nepal (Moon Handbooks).

1. This may be the best guidebook I've ever used-- I read it cover to cover during my trip, and feel like I ought to write Kerry Moran a fan letter. The advice and information in this book helped me to have an amazing and wonderful experience Nepal without always feeling like a clueless tourist. The descriptions of Nepali culture and customs are sensitively written and indespensible for a mystified first time visitor. The guides for trekking routes and towns are right on the mark but not overdetailed, so you get an accurate idea what to expect without being told exactly what to do. The Nepali vocabulary and grammar in the appendix were very handy and I really had fun trying to speak the language. This book does not have good maps, but I was able to get pretty good maps in Nepal.



2. This may be the best guide book I have ever used. I think I should write Kerry Moran a fan letter for helping me to have an amazing and wonderful time on my six-week trip to Nepal without always feeling like a clueless tourist. This guide is so well written and interesting that I read it cover to cover during the trip-- even the sections about places we weren't planning to go. The cultural descriptions are informative and sensitively written, but not unrealistically rose-colored. The guides to towns and trekking routes give you an accurate and practical idea of what to expect when you get there without being overdetailed or bossy about telling you what do. The Nepali vocabulary and grammar in the appendix really came in handy and Nepalis, even when they could speak English, seemed genuinely pleased that I was trying to speak Nepali. The maps are not especially good, but then even with maps you would still have to ask directions. This is a great guide for anyone whose itenerary is not set in stone and who wants to get some genuine insight into Nepali culture.



3. Being a traveller who usually swears by Lonely Planet guides, I have to admit that when it came down to taking one or the other, the Lonely Planet book stayed at home and this one made it into my backpack. It's just plain good. I will be sure to check out other Moon Guides in the future. Their series might soon be alongside my LP and Footprint Guide collections.

1 comments about Foot-Loose in Tokyo: The Curious Traveler's Guide to the 29 Stages of the Yamanote Line (Exploring Japan Series).

1. The Yamanote is the circle line of Tokyo's rail system. And from Jean Pearce's perspective, the line's 29 stations add up to a perfect tour of this marvelous underrated city.

   Pearce, for 42 years a columnist for the English-language Japan Times, is the ideal guide for the tour. Her sharp eye misses few details, and her delightful style conveys her deep love for the city, its neighborhoods and its people.

   Each chapter describes a walking tour of the area around the station, with a mix of historical background and current details. The chapter on Akihabara, Tokyo's electronics district, pays due mention to the area's famous hi-fi and TV purveyors, but wanders on, as you might, to the neighborhood shrines, and then on to neighboring bookshops and an Russian Orthodox church.

   The book is long out of print, and it's possible that some of the shops described are no longer there--though in fast-changing Japan, it's always surprising what survives. But even after so many years, there's still no better armchair tour of Tokyo available, and when you do visit you'll no doubt be able to find the Tokyo that Pearce saw.

1 comments about Where the Indus Is Young: Walking to Baltistan.

1. I am an admitted Dervla Murphy fan, have read most of her books, and gamely suffer her occasional political rants for the greater good. Her books featuring travels in the company of her (at the time) young daughter, Rachel, are particularly harrowing: "Eight Feet in the Andes", "On a Shoestring to Coorg" and "Cameroon with Egbert" are fine examples, as is this book.
   
   Ms. Murphy goes where only the indigenous folks live, and, occasionally, where they are smart enough not to live, and, in this book, to the Northern Areas of Pakistan/India where it is now unlikely that a Westerner could venture, safely or not.
   
   Walking was her mode of travel along the Indus and, at the outset, she and Rachel enjoyed fine accommodations, to wit: "...we have a cell with dirty bedding, no table or chair, a fifteen-watt bulb, no water for the reeking Western loo, and no heating. (A few moments ago I had to stop writing to sit on my hands for long enough to thaw them.)"
   
   But the sublime power of ice, rubble, thin air and the stark beauty of the mountains worked magic despite ritual victimization by government officials and guest house managers along the way. By the time they arrived back in Skardu, Dervla was already planning to return.

No comments about Spectrum Guide to Nepal (Spectrum Guides).

No comments about Me No Speak: China.

1 comments about Cambodia Travel Map (Globetrotter Travel Map).

1. All such available maps are a bit weak, but this is certainly as good as several, and better than most. Don't rely on it too closely, unless you're travelling on decent roads. But you can't rely any more on the competitor maps either. Buy the one which you think you will prefer to use. But if you don't know, then this one is fine, perhaps good.

No comments about Groov HONG KONG Map 'N' Guide.

5 comments about Trail of Feathers: In Search of the Birdmen of Peru.

1. Este es un libro de marcada factura antropológica, de antropología de terreno. Como es sus otros libros, Tahir Shah construye una atmósfera narrativa en la que se incluye, con humor, sin una gota de solemnidad ni de auto consciencia. Inicia la historia con una confesión de interés personal y es capaz de emprender una expedición casi excéntrica en la que invierte sus haberes. Luego va desmenuzando el tema central, desmitificando (curanderos que usan técnicas de amenazas y persuasión semejantes a las que observó en su investigación de los shadu de India)personajes y roles, mostrando los efectos de la invasión cultural, turística e industrial en territorios hasta hace muy poco vírgenes. Plantea abiertamente su repudio por la acción de los evangelistas que, en su afán proselitista, ocasionan daños que ellos mismos no alcanzan a preveer (enfermedades y desaparición paulatina de una sabiduría medicinal milenaria). Finalmente, valida su interés inicial con un real curandero y experimenta la experiencia de volar sobre la selva.
   Con menos humor que en Sorcerer`s Apprentice, pero igual monto de rigor antropológico y una resistencia admirable a las fatigas de viajes llenos de incomodidades y dietas incomibles.
   Para conocer el Amazonas peruano y para mirarse en los personajes.



2. This is not your typical travel book! The author describes a long journey through Peru as he searches for the origins of a myth about people flying in Pre-Columbian Peru. This search involves his discovery, and imparting to us, lots of information about textiles, mummies, shrunken heads, and many, many colorful characters that the author encounters. Honestly, in reading Mr. Shah's books, I can only think that the dreadful places I have stayed in were oases of tranquility and cleanliness when compared to his places: For example, a hotel that keeps its chickens in his bathroom, a hotel that has no other guests because a story is circulating that anyone who stays there will be beheaded by a ghost, a boat so rank that a stay in a pit toilet might be more pleasant, etc. But somehow, when he tells it, you just have to enjoy and laugh. I recommend this book highly to anyone who enjoys travel writing, adventure writing, or simply a great story. As an aside, I should mention that if anyone doubts the possibility of the final scenes (and I do not want to ruin this book for anyone), a beloved relative of mine actually did a similar trip (and I am SO glad I didn't go along! And the only reason I didn't, at the time, was that I thought I would be needed to retrieve her body [which thankfully didn't happen] after such a crazy trip). The physiological experience of the native drug was absolutely perfectly described (and many a jolly laugh we have had over my relative's story at her expense)! So, don't doubt this book is possible. But whether or not it is, read it and enjoy!



3. "O men, up from you I fly.
   I am not for the earth, I am for the sky.
   I have soared to the sky as a herald,
   I have kissed the sky as a falcon,
   The essence of a god, the son of a god,
   The messenger of a god am I."
   (Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts)
   
   It seems to me these beautiful, evocative opening lines of an ancient poem belong somewhere in Tahir Shah's powerful work on the Incas and Birdmen of Peru, the best book in the travel genre I've read to date. (And, indeed, early in the author's research into the question of actual flight by ancient man, an expert whom he consults reminds us of the model airplane, or glider, which was found in an ancient Egyptian tomb in Saqqara in 1898.)
   This book is much more than a fascinating and often hilarious travel book; to me it is more akin to a narrative of an unfolding spiritual journey. In addition to the usual points of interest of a Peruvian tour, this author's 'nose' for uncovering the 'underbelly' of a given culture allows him to get right to the heart of a matter he is investigating. And, true to his Sufi upbringing, he is not afraid to seek knowledge wherever it takes him; by means of itself, by experience, not content to be a mere observer (or as the proverb goes, "He who tastes, knows.")
   Thus, his ocular experience of El Colibri (the Hummingbird), and the other symbols of the Nazca Lines from a Cessna, prove to be only a prelude (almost like a facsimile from the past), a metaphor, for the riveting experience which is to follow, as, undaunted, the trail leads him into the heart of the Upper Amazonian jungle to find the descendants of those who occupied the coastal Nazca plain when the Lines were made, before they and their shamans were driven into the interior by the Spanish Conquistadors.
   Loose your grip on your analytical, Western mind and get ready to "kiss the sky"!
   Early in his quest, perched precariously atop Huayna Picchu, looking directly down on Machu Picchu, the author recounts a conversation which hints of ancient memories of a forgotten and glorious past:
   "I opened my eyes a crack, and began to understand the significance of Machu Picchu. Stretching out in symmetrical flanks, on east and west, the ruins were arranged as wings. Once I saw them, I couldn't get them out of my mind. They gleamed up at me, glinting in the yellow light.
   Machu Picchu was laid out in the shape of a condor.
   I would have slithered my way back down to the cafe much sooner. But a refined-looking Peruvian man was watching me.
   'It's a condor!' I shouted. 'Machu Picchu's a gigantic condor!'
   The man was dressed in a sheepskin jacket, with the flaps of a woollen hat pulled down snugly over his ears. His nose was streaming, ad his cheeks were scarlet. In his hand was a tin, and in it were coca leaves.
   'The condor is the messenger,' he said in English, offering me some of the leaves.
   'Whose messenger?'
   Resting the tin on his knee, the man washed his hands over his face.
   'The condor links us to heaven,' he said. 'Just as it did the Incas. It is the bridge, the bridge between man and God.'
   'Could the Incas glide like condors?'
   The man twisted the corners of his mouth into a smile.
   'We can all fly,' he said.
   'All of us?'
   The man nodded.
   'Si, all of us.'
   He paused, to regard me sideways on.
   'Todos tenemos alas, we all have wings,' he said, 'but we have forgotten how to use them.'



4. This is the second of Mr. Shah's books I have read. I will probably end up reading them all. It's hard not to like a book whose opening sentence is "The trail began at an auction of shrunken heads." He is an excellent author and his tales are fascinating. If you read this book to the end you will be able to shrink heads, but only practice on sloths.



5. _Trail of Feathers_ by Tahir Shah began at an unusual place; at a London auction of shrunken heads. The author, who had been on the trail of shrunken heads for some time and who had sought to begin a collection, was frustrated by his lack of funds and the limited availability of tsantsas (as they are more properly called, a product of the Jivaro people of South America). However he did come across a mention of something else interesting out of Peru, a group referred to by a cryptic Frenchmen as "the Birdmen." At first dismissing this ("at shrunken head sales, you get more than the usual smattering of madmen"), he meets another (insane?) South American Indian enthusiast, this time a self-schooled authority on ancient flight, an eccentric man who maintained that the Maya, Aztecs, and Incas had all built gliders (along with of course the Ancient Egyptians and King Solomon himself). Like the Frenchmen, this expert urges Shah to go to Peru and do his own research.
   
   After also coming across a brief mention by an early 17th century Spanish monk by the name of Friar Antonio de la Calancha, who wrote "...the Incas flew over the jungle like birds," Shah decided to put together a one-man expedition to Peru and find out the truth himself. Could the Incas or other Andean peoples really fly, or was it just myth and legend?
   
   What followed was a two part journey through the mountains, deserts, jungles, cities, and tiny villages of Peru. During the first half of his expedition Shah was largely alone and traveled from Machu Picchu to Lake Titicaca across the Altiplano through Nazca and on to Lima. On his quest for something - anything - that could shed light on whether there was flight among the Andean peoples Shah introduces the reader to the many unusual sights and people of Peru. Among the author's many encounters were the textile weavers of Taquile (an island in Lake Titicaca), who bemoaned that the once sacred cloth was mostly sold to tourists now instead of more properly being sacrificed to spirits, the chullpas (round-sided towers) of Sillustani (did the Incas once jump off of them; Shah recounted how there was a medieval fad of sorts, tower-jumping); and the famous Nazca Lines, huge geometric and animal shapes, so immense that they were only first noticed by a pilot in the 1930s. Shah wrote that this fact lead an American by the name of Jim Woodman in the 1970s to speculate that ancient man had in fact flown in balloons, citing the fact that ritual smoke balloons were used in Guatemala and the Quechua language had a word for "balloon-maker" (Woodman later built a working balloon he dubbed _Condor I_ and flew it). Shah found images of Birdmen in a museum containing Paracas textiles (Paracas being a pre-Incan culture of the Peruvian coast that existed between 1300 BC and 200 AD and was noted for the exquisite textiles they used to wrap their mummified dead, found in immense cemeteries in the desert).
   
   After consulting with various people in his trip, Shah came to the conclusion that Incan and pre-Incan flight was likely more metaphysical, allegorical, or mental. One local urged him that in order to understand the Birdmen one had to understand the drugs that they took while they were alive. He stated that they drank a tea made from a vine, known as ayahuasca or "the vine of the dead" (scientifically it was two species, _Banisteriopsis caapi_ and _Banisteropsis inebrians_), which gave the user the feeling of growing wings and flying. A professor he met told Shah that ayahuasca was still in use by various tribes in the jungles of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, Brazil, and Peru, including coincidentally, the Jivaro (which means "barbarian;" though that is their most famous name, the proper name for them is the Shuar, which means "men").
   
   The second half of Shah's expedition becomes an often frustrating trek to find brewers of ayahuasca among the Shuar, an expedition that begins in the jungle city of Iquitos and takes him hundreds of miles downstream the Amazon River and its tributaries. After a series of adventures in Iquitos Shah manages to finally find a reliable guide, a very colorful man by the name of Richard Fowler, a Vietnam veteran (who volunteered for Vietnam, saying "As far as I was concerned it was an all expenses paid, two year snake hunt, with unusual and additional hazards thrown in"), who promised Shah only one thing, that he would keep him alive. Putting together an unusual team (including a local man by the name of Cockroach and a shaman) on a rickety, rotting wooden, rat-infested boat (infested by still worse things when Shah ordered the rats removed), they do make contact with the much feared Shuar, something many people had warned the author would do various dire things, including slit his throat, decapitate him and shrink his head, or eat him.
   
   This was a very enjoyable book, as the author was an excellent writer and really did a good job of describing what he saw and the people he met. I loved how he contrasted his earlier expectations of the jungle and what "experts" in London said he would find with the real thing and found him often funny without trying to hard to be so (as some travel essay writers are prone to doing). He clearly did a good amount of research, as he had a several page bibliography and two appendices, one detailing the science and history behind ayahuasca as well as several other Amazonian flora-based hallucinogens and a number of Old World ones as well (some authors he said speculated that hallucinogenic content of Syrian rue might have given rise to the vivid geometric designs of Oriental carpets as well as legends about flying carpets) and the other the history and culture of the Shuar (going into detail about the how and why of the tsantsas).

2 comments about Guizhou Province, Second Edition (Odyssey Illustrated Guides).

1. I normally don't like Odyssey guidebooks, but a Chinese friend gave me their guidebook to Guizhou when I was undecided where to go on holiday. On the basis of it, I decided to visit the province as part of a three-week trip out of Beijing to South China. The book has excellent photos, but was light in areas on how-to details. I used it in tandem with Lonely Planet's guide to China, and the two complimented each other nicely. I only spent 10 days in Guizhou, which wasn't enough. I'm heading back someday, and will use the guide to festival dates in the book to better plan my visit.



2. Guizhou is a fascinating area to see the culture of some of China's ethnic minorities, having visited the province twice recently myself, but there are too few books in English on this province.

   Gina Corrigan's book is a must for anyone who wants an understanding of the culture and history of the colourful people here. The book is well organized into different parts of Guizhou, with lots of sugested itineraries. It also gives an excellent overview of the different ethnic groups and its customs.

   This is by no means a comprehensive book on Guizhou. That would require a size many times this one. There are just too many hidden corners to explore. There are places in the book that I wish for more specific details. The book is also thin on pratical information such as buses, trains, hotel lists. The Lonely planet SW China Guide would be a workable complement for that.

   There are some beautiful photos in the book. Even if you don;t plan on visiting the area soon, it still makes a very interesting book to read.

3 comments about Japan.

1. Wow, this is one beautiful book. All of the considerable beauty of the island nation of Japan has been sought out, carefully selected, and elegantly photographed to be even more stunning than it is in real life. There is quite a sweeping range of images here, from the lavender fields and Snow Festival of Hokkaido, to the ancient temples of Nara and Kyoto, all the way to the high technology of the ASIMO robot and the mag-lev Bullet Train. This is the kind of book that makes me really want to go to Japan, even though I live there.
   
   "Seeing Japan" is not an honest look at Japan, but more of a love-letter or a tourists brochure. There is not anything so much as hinting at a dark corner on this Isle of Wonders. All of the images are radiant and lovely, with the bad parts carefully edited out. There is no stray shot of the spider's web of powerlines that covers the country, obscuring almost all scenes of beauty. The temples contain no element of the loudspeakers that blare away history lessons and advertisements, or the hustle and bustle of the millions of people that are everywhere you go. Looking at this book, one would almost think that Japan was a serene, quiet country, which of course it is not.
   
   And that's OK. There are plenty of other books out there looking at the underbelly of Japan, so it is nice to have one that is pure frosting. Sometimes it is easy to forget what a spectacularly beautiful country Japan is. It takes a photographer's eye to bring out the very best, to showcase the colors and the textures that are so very abundant. It takes someone like Charles Whipple to write the text, a nostalgic guided tour through a country he obviously loves, to inspire one to hunt for this Japan, the Japan of my Dreams.



2. I almost fainted when I read in Zack Davisson's review, "There is no stray shot of the spider's web of powerlines that covers the country, obscuring almost all scenes of beauty." I thought I was the only person in the universe who had ever made that observation about the stark difference between the incredible natural beauty one sees on posters and in coffee-table books and the real Japan you find before your eyes and under your feet.
   
   (You know what observation Mr. Davisson forgot to make? The fact that there's no such thing as zoning: you'll find a Disneyland next to a farm next to a cemetery, without so much as a tree to separate the one from the other. Well, that, plus the ceaseless flow of "suburbs": on the 300-plus-mile bullet-train run from Tokyo to Kyoto, we could scarcely discern a single patch of green--although we did find 30-story skyscrapers out in the middle of nowhere [!]--plus one of the ugliest hamlets I've seen in my life, with a mountaintop sign proudly [and most ironically] proclaiming in kanji, "Chrysanthemum River Ward" [Kikkawa-Gu].)
   
   The memory that will always stick foremost in my consciousness is of the young guy who scuttled down the street slapping adhesive prostitutes' business cards (I guess they're "business labels," then) wherever they'd fit: on a lamppost; on a newspaper vending machine; on a postbox; even on a manhole cover (in Japan, those are quaint, sometimes bearing mosaic cartoons of firemen in samurai regalia).
   
   I have more books on Japan and Japanese and Japanese culture and Japanese mythology and Japanese history than I care to recount, but this title just really didn't add anything to it. Too, too bad.



3. This book was given as a gift to a person who will be traveling to Japan this year. He briefly scanned the book and seemed happy with it. I know after the holidays are over, he will totally go page by page. He is an artist and I know he will appreciate the photography throughout.