1 comments about Lonely Planet Kerala (Lonely Planet Travel Guides).

1. Many times it's difficult to include minute details while retaining the ability to quickly find information. This guidebook, like many other Lonely Planet books, manages to make researching a trip very easy. Included are such details as available hotels and restaurant in each city. You can also find great itinerary planners if you have no clue about where to start. With the suggested itineraries and the details about each city it's easy to plan an enjoyable trip - for backpackers and regular tourists alike.

No comments about The Jeff Corwin Experience - Spanish - Dentro De La India Salvaje (The Jeff Corwin Experience - Spanish).

No comments about Modern India and the Indians: Being a Series of Impressions, Notes, and Essays.

No comments about The Book of Indian Trees.

No comments about Adventures during a Journey Overland to India, by Way of Egypt, Syria, and the Holy Land: Volume 2.

No comments about Bangalore - An Expat Survival Guide.

No comments about Chennai, not Madras: Perspectives on the City.

3 comments about Wayfaring.

1. Haskale's "Wayfaring" is an outstanding book in many ways.
   It is a unique combination of letters, diary excerpts, poems and reflections, describing a voyage turned into an internal journey. Side by side with profound philosophical insights are the small details and vignettes that make up the daily life of the traveller: buying socks in Afghanistan, waiting for visas, meeting interesting people en route. Haskale ignores neither the esthetics of views and cities nor the social political realities of the third world countries she is travelling through. She is also always aware of her own identity as a woman, especially since she travelled alone in male dominated countries.
   The book is particularly pertinent now, when pre-revolutionary Iran and pre-American-invasion Afghanistan are irrecoverably lost. Ms. Haskale's perspective as someone who has lived in both Israel and New Mexico makes for interesting insights.
   The mixing of genres makes the book very easy to read or flip through.
   I recommend this book to anyone interested in travelling the outer and the inner worlds.



2. Wayfaring: A Journey to Inner Space is actually two works, which together describe a quest pursued in the outer and inner worlds. Whatever one's view of the religious philosophy it expresses, this is a book written by a fine poet with a keen eye, ear and heart, and thus revealing in many ways. The first part, "Get Thee Forth," is a travel journal. In 1978 Hadassah Haskale, an American-born poet living in Israel, set off, alone, for India. "I go with my lantern, crying, laughing. All by myself. Many going, swinging our lanterns, pilgrims hungry to know, lost children pursuing fireflies." Traveling by boat, train and bus, she reached India after a month-long journey. "An adventure is a diffculty you can enjoy -- mostly in retrospect," she remarks wryly. After travelling in India for two months she settled for three months in the ashram at Pondicherry. She contemplates remaining there but returns to Israel in April, 1978. Impressions of people and landscapes, poems, dreams, letters to friends, notes from lectures on spiritual subjects, comprise this book. Her observations show us not only the sights, sounds and thoughts of India, but also the sensibility of a Westernized Jew, skeptical of her people's claim to chosenness, wary of the "overemotional" connectedness of the Jewish family, but still connected to Israel in a deeply emotional way and unable (as she remarks at various points) to stomach American materialism, bow down to a statue or a human being, respond to the "brainwashing" of repetitive mantras, or fail to wince almost continually at the abject position of women in Eastern countries. It may be noted that the Pondicherry ashram, where she feels most at home in India, was founded by the British-educated Aurobindo whose spiritual partner was another Westernized Jewish woman, Mira Alfassa, still widely revered in India as "The Mother." As a Jew-by-choice who had enough of eastern mysticism in Berkeley, I had to struggle with exasperation while reading this book. And yet I came to feel that its ultimate subject (as the title hints) is not the encounter with India per se but the effort to get out of one's hereditary framework for the sake of a much-needed global consciousness. I could not but be moved by the unflinching honesty of the instrospection, and awed by the courage, persistence and sheer force of will that impelled this journey through a world that has since changed drastically.
   The last fourth of the book, "Inscape," is a long poem in which the poet seeks to orient herself in the universe through evocations of history and her own personal experiences. It ends: "Congealed universe/radiating thwarted arms/ embraces the void." If this is not the optimistic vision the poem seems to be searching for, still it is a vision, and as these lines show, Haskale is a poet of considerable power. Wayfaring isn't a simple or an easy book, but it is one worth reading and returning to.



3. Hadassah Haskale opens her book, Wayfaring, with: "You asked me to jot down my impressions of India. I wonder. Who is taking this journey? Can I see that place for you?"
   
   I have never traveled to India, but after reading the author's vivid and stirring accounts, I almost feel she has seen the place for me. The candor and insight she brings to her descriptions of her experiences in prose, letters, and verse are remarkable.
   
   The book also chronicles another, inner journey -- as Hadassah is transformed by what she sees and does in India: "No sooner do I hold still in one place than I notice how differently I perceive things from one day to the next as I grow stronger and in some subtle way grow into my surroundings."
   
   I recommend this little volume for anyone with an adventurous heart. Its price is a tiny fraction of what a ticket to India would cost, and yet it offers a valuable and powerful vicarious visit.

No comments about Kashmir, Ladakh and Tibet.

No comments about Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400-1800.