2008-08-04 One of the classic travel books

This book is a very informative, enlightening and interesting read.

This book is a pleasure to read. It is easy to follow the author as he travels around the world. He starts explaining briefly about his background in Poland and his desire to `cross the border' and how, as a consequence, he finds himself being sent to India.

Perhaps one of the main attractive qualities of the author is that he is honest; he doesn't say he likes or even enjoys all of the places he travels to. For example, taking his first long-haul trip to India, the reader gets the impression that he really entered at the deep end and found it quite tough.

Later in the book he goes on to discuss in more detail the reasons why people travel and this `philosophy of travel' adds to the book where in the hands of a less clever writer, this could be very dull.

I also liked the way he used the device of following in the footsteps of the ancient Greek traveller and arguably the world's first historian, Herodotus. He didn't literally follow Herodotus' route or try to visit places Herodotus had visited but rather used Herodotus' attitudes and experiences in parallel with his own.

The author is one of the great travel writers of the 20th century and I'll definitely be trying to read further works by him.