THE LONGEST WALK
An Odyssey of the Human Spirit
George Meegan
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1988
402 pp., $19.95
BEHIND THE WALL
A Journey through China
Colin Thubron
New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. 1988
307 pp., $18.95
PATHS LESS TRAVElLED
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Exploration
Edited by Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen
New York: Atheneum, 1988
168 pp., $24.95
I believe it was Yogi Berra who said, "No matter where you go, there you are."
Funny, yet sad—the saying is particularly true for low-budget solitary travelers. While vacationers travel to escape, travelers are compelled to discover both the places they visit and themselves. And when the lone journeyers return and chronicle their experiences in print, the goings from place to place, the food, the landscape and architecture, the languages, the people, and their costumes become a backdrop for introspection.
The best travel books combine the looking out with the looking in, and the readers, too, are guided on a private snapshot tour of experiences that tell us as much about ourselves as the places we visit.
Three books just out take the reader to exotic places, and reveal something about the writers and about ourselves along the way.
From the bottom to the top
On January 26, 1977, British merchant sailor George Meegan and his Japanese girlfriend, Yoshiko, began a seven-year, nineteen-thousand-mile walk from Tierra del Fuego in South America to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. To the people he encountered along the way, Meegan's journey seemed like a white man's crazy lark, an unfettered freedom walk. In reality, the goal of walking every step of the way, from nearly the bottom of the world to the top, became an obsession, almost a prison. Meegan, who had been drawn to the sea through his interest in travel, wanted to complete a journey no other man had made. To quit the walk, despite the incredible obstacles of an insanely inadequate budget, criminals, the extremes of hot and cold weather, revolutions, and a million other hindrances, would have been to forfeit the core of his identity.
When she agreed to go with Meegan on the journey, Yoshiko's English was so poor that she did not understand that he meant to walk the entire way. Eventually, they married and she went back to Japan to have their baby. Most of the seven years that Meegan spent on the road is a repetitive chronicle of forty-kilometer days spent fighting mosquitoes and thirst (finding a daily ration of Coca-Cola was paramount), wishing the trek were over, and longing for
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