Adventure Travel
Going native can lead to culture shock -- and a good book or two.
When on a vacation in a faraway place, who hasn't dreamt about not going home? Whether far from home for work, love, the Lord or lack of anything better to do, the following real-life protagonists attempted to go native, with mixed success.
A Missionary to the Rescue
In a Far Country (PublicAffairs, $26.95), John Taliaferro's superb against-the-odds tale, remembers Tom Lopp, a missionary stationed in remote Alaska in 1898, who answered the government's call to drive hundreds of reindeer to the territory's northernmost tip in order to save the starving crews of eight icebound whaling ships. News of the 1898 Overland Relief Expedition -- Lopp's two-month, 700-mile, subzero ordeal over ice and untracked tundra -- was reported in the States, but the public's interest soon turned to gold fever, the Spanish-American War and the annexation of Hawaii. "Derring-do was now de rigueur," Taliaferro observes.
But while the expedition was perhaps the most dramatic episode of Lopp's years in Alaska, it was far from his only accomplishment. He and his wife and the few other missionaries in this frozen land spent very little time proselytizing; they were immersed in the everyday business of teaching English, finding food and shelter, and trying to sustain self-sufficient, law-abiding communities.
Taliaferro, a former senior editor at Newsweek and author of three earlier books, expertly introduces readers to the forces of nature, religion, culture, business and government at work in the late 1800s, as well as the smaller miracles of Lopp's relationship with his wife, Ellen. Taliaferro captures a time when missionaries, whales and reindeer held the future for Alaska and its natives -- that is, until three Norwegian prospectors struck gold near Cape Nome and the white population of northern Alaska exploded from two dozen to more than 10,000 in months. The rescue effort does not occur until late in the book, and by then Lopp has beaten the odds so many times his success is almost anticlimactic.
The Man Who Goes Nowhere
After reading about someone traveling to do something heroic, reading about someone traveling to do nothing is a bore. In Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist (Scribner; paperback, $13), Daniel Kalder tells of having chosen a novel way to express his disgust at the banality of modern travel. A Scottish writer living in Russia, Kalder joined fellow "anti-tourists" in making 13 "Shymkent Declarations," the first of which states: "The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable." He then decided to scale the peak of anti-tourism: to visit four republics of the former Soviet Union all but unknown to Westerners (and most Russians, in fact).
Kalder encountered lunar landscapes in Tatarstan, mail-order brides in Udmurtia, pagans in Mari El and such sorry landmarks as Chess City, a long-abandoned competition site built to the order of Kalmykia's shady president. But mainly he walked down dead-end streets, followed thin leads, took bad photos and lay about in dingy hotel rooms dreaming up movie plots (none promising).
Save for his cheeky Brit wit, he is a less than thrilling raconteur. He admits that perhaps it would be more interesting to connect with the locals, but he doesn't "much like talking to people." The natives and their customs and cities remain a mystery. I'd call Kalder not an anti-tourist but a bad one. He leaves each place taking nothing of it with him; so do we.
Mixed Marriage
Corinne Hofmann, the author of The White Masai (Amistad, $24.95; translated from the German by Peter Millar), can scarcely be accused of not connecting with the natives. On a vacation to Kenya in the 1980s, the 27-year-old Swiss-German businesswoman had a chance meeting with a regal Masai warrior and, despite their having only one or two words in common, decided to chuck everything to follow him into the Kenyan bush, hundreds of miles from Nairobi.
Hofmann found herself married with a baby, in a hut built of cow dung, washing her clothes in the river, gnawing on burnt goat legs and enduring numerous illnesses, including malnutrition, malaria and hepatitis -- but, for a time, she felt entirely at home. Sadly, what begins as a bodice-ripper ends as a thriller: Faced with her husband's fits of rage, disappearing acts and profligate ways, Hofmann tried to spirit their daughter back to Switzerland. What happens next? Wait for the U.S. release of Hofmann's two sequels.
The White Masai, an international bestseller, was made into a popular German movie in 2005. Indeed, Hofmann's saga is intensely cinematic. Though her prose may not be remarkable, her story most certainly is.
Splish Splash
Nice work if you can get it: After more than 20 years of living in Japan, Associated Press journalist Eric Talmadge appreciated a good soak but didn't fully grasp the exalted place of the bath in his adopted culture, so he decided to take the plunge.
In Getting Wet: Adventures in the Japanese Bath (Kodansha, $22), Talmadge travels to the hot springs of centuries-old mountain villages and to tidal pools on volcanic islands. He visits a neighborhood public bath and Tokyo's largest bathing theme park, where Disney-esque employees dress in feudal costume and visitors saunter from baths to food court to souvenir stand, clad only in flimsy theme robes. He braves a "Hertz bath," pulsating with electric shocks, and a radon hot springs resort. He makes the acquaintance of a "hot water girl," who specializes in getting dirty, not clean. Ever the reporter, Talmadge covers the history of public bathing in Japan, the bath industry, the chemistry of bathing, even a recent lawsuit challenging the Japanese-only policy of most public bath houses.
His "Tub Tips" address all our nagging questions: Towel placement? Soap? STDs? Naked or not? The plentiful photographs are delightful, and Talmadge is an appealing writer. But the various episodes feel more like a series of articles than a unified narrative. By the last 20 pages, when he started carrying on about "the perfect bath," toilet technology and "the worst shower in the world," I started feeling prune-y. Time to get out of the water. ·
Kate Fogarty, who lives in New York, is senior editor of Modernism magazine.
