No comments about Tigers, Durbars and Kings: Fanny Eden's Indian Journals, 1837-1838.

No comments about India Insight Guide (Insight Guides).

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No comments about Goa & Bombay Travel Pack (Globetrotter Travel Packs).

No comments about Encyclopaedia of Hindi Cinema.

No comments about Timeless India (Timeless).

5 comments about Ultimate Journey: Retracing the Path of an Ancient Buddhist Monk Who Crossed Asia in Search of Enlightenment.

1. _The ultimate Journey_
   retracing the path of an ancient buddhist monk who crosses asia in search of enlightment

   by richard bernstein

   I bought the book in HongKong several summers ago, as i waited for my Chinese visa, knowing this would be the last new English bookstore for awhile.
   It was a good choice, well written, interesting and really to the point. For it is a combination of travelogue and spiritual adventure in trying to retrace the path of Hsuan Tsang .
   Mixed up are the author's thoughts about the reading about Hsuan Tsang and his journey, the physical places that both visit as Bernstein follows the ancient monk's path, and social commentary not just on the places and people but reflects a lifetime of a newspaperman's experiences in this part of the world. What could be a very disjointed and fragmented 'stream of consciousness' travelogue turns out to be a rather organized investigation into not just the author's current travels but the relationship of the monks journey and what happened in the intervening years from the mid 7th C. Well written as the author is a successful and introspective newspaper writer, thoughtful as this is really a work from the heart for him, and for me very much to the point as i had the book with me in Xian as the Big Goose pagoda.
   Because of the dearth of english reading material that summer travelling, i think i read it twice, once straight through and at least once more a page or chapter at a time as i was starving for anything to read, even something i had already finished. I was not disappointed, for his writing and insights are deep and bear close reading. but most of all it was worth the weight in my already overloaded pack, a true recommendation from the heart and shoulders. enjoy.




2. I'm a Buddhist, an international 3rd world traveler and I love travel writing. I thought I'd love this book and was very disappointed. The author should have taken the time to develop some Buddhist practice before launching into inaccurate intellectual Buddhist psycho babble. If you want to write about Buddhism, close the books and develop a mediation practice....everything else misses the mark. Without that perspective the book is boring.



3. While not qualified to judge the author's comments on Buddhism, the book, for me, was one of the best travel books I've ever read. For some reason, Central Asia with its blood-stirring names -- Tashkent, Samarkand, the Silk Road, etc. -- has always fascinated me. Bernstein, in his 50s, did what I, now in my 60s, would have liked to have done but didn't -- travel the Silk Road and exotic points beyond. Perhaps his struggle with his mid-life crisis made his book all the more poignant to this old coot, but I found the story of the monk searching for truth and the story of the journalist searching for himself nicely completmentary. By the time I had finished this delightful book, I felt that I had accompanied the author along the way. And if Bernstein can do that for me, then I pronounce "Ultimate Journey" a helluva good read.



4. Great writing about travel, history and Buddhism are but a few of my major interests, so I was looking forward to digging into Richard Bernstein's ULTIMATE JOURNEY.
   
   But alas, this is not great writing about travel, history or Buddhism - though (with that latter gripe) as this book often drifts towards the upscale insularity and ivory-tower navel-gazing tendencies Western Buddhism is occasionally accused of, it's probably just as well.
   
   Bernstein's many, many digressions completely derailed this book - his writing about his own ancestry are one of the few places things come alive here, the other being his summation of Hsuan Tsang's actual journey through China, central Asia, and India.
   
   Elsewhere, we get a lot of stuff about the Chinese girlfriend (methinks she'd have written a far more interesting book), the career ennui of an exceptionally priveleged man (at this late date, not automatically interesting, or unique in the least), credentials (which are impressive), and a lucky sidekick (a tall "L. L. Bean"-esque Chinese gentleman, generally referred to as Brave King, described as being eager to tag along as a respite from guiding malevolent Turks around the Gobi, though I'd have liked to hear a bit more of what Brave King was actually thinking, and those Turks were probably just misbegotten midlife crisis dudes from Ankara off on some sort of half-cocked sand-blasted vision quest across the wilds of Xinjiang).
   
   There have been a number of great books about Asia, blending history, travel and occasionally Buddhism in grand fashion: Peter Matthiessen's SNOW LEOPARD, Pico Iyer's THE LADY AND THE MONK, Vikram Seth's FROM HEAVEN LAKE, and Ma Jian's RED DUST - the last three written by actual Asians. For all of it's pretenses, ULTIMATE JOURNEY does little to challenge the stature of those classics. Oh well.
   
   -David Alston



5. Unbelievable that the author could have transformed an epic pilgrimage by a legendary Buddhist hero into a dreary travelogue which passes from train to cab to rickshaw against a background of the author's midlife crisis.
   The title itself is misleading because there is no journey. There is an uninspiring movement from place to place, but if there was any growth to be had, the author missed out on it. He professes no spiritual belief, and his disdain for the spiritual beliefs of those around him is explicit. Why travel around the world following the path of a devout Buddhist when you don't even believe in Buddhism?
   This book should be required reading for the author's mother and his wife, probably the only two people who would find his pathetic musings the least bit interesting. The most important lesson to be learned from Ultimate Journey is that Bernstein lived a really interesting life, but when he turned 50, he let his fears push him into trying to make something grand happen. If he had looked inside for his ultimate journey, it would have been a lot more interesting and meaningful than this tepid tome.
   I gave it two stars because of how clearly he describes the misery of travelling in China (now topping my "Do Not Visit" list).

1 comments about The Lives of a Bengal Lancer.

1. What a great book. Yeats-Brown is an upper-class officer in a colonial regiment in India, and his writing style is reminiscent of Sassoon, Manning and Fussell, although not quite on their level. However, his story of life in a colonial regiment is very familiar to those officers serving in England...the lifestyle (pre WWI) of polo, hunting and life at the mess is very consistent.
   Where I found this book intriguing is Yeats-Brown's mobilization for WWI. The book takes interesting turns as he is sent to Europe, then back to Mesopotamia, but not as a Lancer but as an observer for the newly formed Royal Flying Corps.
   I believe Yeats-Brown has written other books about his captivity with the Turks, but this book has a good narrative of his time as a prisoner in wartime Turkey.
   THe book concludes with Yeats-Brown discovering the religions of India, and his eagerness to learn their secrets. Very interesting account of colonial India by someone who was a bit more observant of local customs than the average British officer.
   Easy to read...highly recommended

No comments about Westward Bound: Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb.

1 comments about Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India.

1. Asia's overland route
   
   Hit the road, Jack
   Jul 20th 2006
   The Economist
   
   IN THE 1960s, thousands of free-spirits set forth on the world's wildest trail, stretching 6,000 miles across six countries and three religions. The Asian odyssey began in Turkey and, barring mechanical (or mental) breakdown, took in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan before ending up in the revered destinations of India and Nepal.
   
   Rory MacLean retraces the steps of these "intrepids" to find out why the hippie trail became the journey of the age. The original flower children, he explains, wanted to swap the conformism of the 1950s for spiritual enlightenment. Inspired by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the social revolutions of the time, they flocked east aboard a patchouli-scented convoy of psychedelic buses, Bedford trucks and VW campervans.
   
   Thousands took to the road, fuelled by dope and the dream of nirvana. In 1968, the year the Beatles were meditating with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, there were 10,000 young foreigners in India. Five years later, that number were crossing the border from Pakistan each week. By the mid-1970s, Afghanistan, an easygoing paradise, welcomed 90,000 visitors a year.
   
   Mr MacLean is an entertaining guide, conjuring the flavour of the trail: the Pudding Shop in Istanbul catering for the travellers' "sugar-craving munchies"; the rose-scented, bug-infested Crown hotel in Delhi; pipes of Mustang at the Eden Hash Centre in Kathmandu; embroidered jeans, ankle bells, karma, peace and love.
   
   Yet "Magic Bus" is more than a series of travel anecdotes; it raises questions about how the hippies influenced the places they visited. In Turkey, the author learns how their rejection of materialism spurred their host's material prosperity. In Iran, he asks if their "casual morality" stirred the "stern Islamic reawakening".
   
   The popularity of the overland route declined when Iran's borders closed in 1979. Yet the trail gave birth to an industry which has packaged the globe. Independent travel is fashionable, students' gap years are becoming the norm, and guide books--the route was the starting point for the Lonely Planet empire--sell in huge numbers. Sadly, however, politics has, in one way or another, put the brakes on the magic bus.