Mark Ellingham - OxTravels

Thanks

OxTravels was developed by Mark Ellingham of Profile Books ( www.profilebooks.com ), Barnaby Rogerson of Eland Books ( www.travelbooks.co.uk ) and Peter Florence of Hay Festival ( www.hayfestival.com ), together with Tom Childs of Oxfam.

Thanks from each of us to the authors who generously donated their stories and time to the book, and to the photographers who allowed us to use their work, in support of Oxfam. Thanks also to their publishers and agents for their support of the project.

At Profile, special thanks to Peter Dyer for the inspired cover design. At Oxfam, thanks to Brian Harley, Sara Griffiths, Rose Marsh, Matt Kurton and David McCullough.

OxTravels 2011 Profile Books.

All individual stories the authors (see Permissions, following)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

Set in Sabon, Bradon and LLRubberGrotesque
Page design by Henry Iles

First published in 2011 by
Profile Books
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street, Exmouth Market
London EC1R OJH

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Bookmarque, Croydon CR0 4TD, on Forest Stewardship Council (mixed sources) certified paper

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-184668 496 8
eISBN 978-184765 745 9

MEETINGS OF REMARKABLE TRAVEL WRITERS

INTRODUCED BY

MICHAEL PALIN

EDITED BY

MARK ELLINGHAM, PETER FLORENCE
AND BARNABY ROGERSON

All the stories in OxTravels are copyright of the authors and have been licensed to this collection for one-off rights. Except otherwise detailed below, all pieces are published here for the first time and thus 2011.

Introduction Michael Palin; Return of the Native Nicholas Shakespeare; Madam Say Go Sonia Faleiro; The Monks Luggage Paul Theroux (adapted from Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Hamish Hamilton, 2008); Blood Diamonds Peter Godwin (adapted from The Fear, Picador, 2010); Arifin Ruth Padel (adapted from Tigers in Red Weather, Little Brown, 2005); The Nuns Tale William Dalrymple (adapted from Nine Lives, Bloomsbury, 2009); The Last Man Alive Oliver Bullough; The Penguin and the Tree Lloyd Jones; Manoli Victoria Hislop; Costa John Julius Norwich; The Other World John Gimlette; Three Tibetans in Ireland Dervla Murphy; Rafaelillo Jason Webster; A Piece of String Shehan Karunatilaka; The End of the Bolster Sara Wheeler; Encounter in the Amazon Hugh Thomson; Love in a Hot Climate Rory MacLean; A Confederacy of Ghosts Jasper Winn; The Beggar King Aminatta Forna; The Fall and Rise of a Rome Patient Ian Thomson; Cures for Serpents Chris Stewart; On the Way to Timbuktu Michael Jacobs; Big Yellow Taxi Tiffany Murray; The Orchid Lady Robin Hanbury-Tenison; With Eyes Wide Open Raja Shehadeh; Decide To Be Bold Janine di Giovanni; The Man Who Laughed in a Tomb Anthony Sattin; A Villain Horatio Clare; The Zoo from the Outside Tom Bullough; Meetings with Remarkable Poets Sarah Maguire; Letting Greene Go Tim Butcher; Heat of Darkness David Shukman (adapted from An Iceberg As Big As Manhattan, Profile Books, 2011); The Fourth World Jan Morris; The Wrestler Rory Stewart; In Mandalay Colin Thubron; A Cave on the Black Sea Patrick Leigh Fermor (from Words of Mercury, John Murray, 2003); Afterword Barbara Stocking/Oxfam.

OxTravels is a very simple idea. We asked the best travel writers based in Britain and a few further afield for a story loosely based around a meeting. There were no rules except that the story should be true and the meeting real. The book follows on from Ox-Tales, our collection of stories from fiction writers, published in 2009, and again its purpose is primarily to raise funds for Oxfams work. All of the authors have again donated their royalties to Oxfam.

The original concept was for a book of about 250 pages, with contributions from twenty writers. We had imagined only about half the travel writers that we approached would find time to contribute. They tend to be away travelling, after all. But the response was almost unanimous, both from the established authors and from those we identified as an emerging new wave of travel writers. Almost all have contributed original material, though a handful of authors, for whom that was impossible due to immediate commitments, have adapted previously published pieces.

So here they are: thirty-six compelling stories, together with an introduction from Michael Palin and an afterword by Oxfams own chief traveller, Barbara Stocking.

Mark Ellingham, Peter florence and Barnaby Rogerson Editors, OxTravels

MICHAEL PALIN (born Broomhill, Sheffield, 1943) established his reputation with Monty Pythons Flying Circus and Ripping Yarns. His work also includes several Python films, The Missionary, A Private Function and A Fish Called Wanda. He has written books to accompany his seven travel series Around the World in Eighty Days, Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Hemingway Adventure, Sahara, Himalaya and New Europe as well as a novel, Hemingways Chair. He is currently President of the Royal Geographical Society.

MICHAEL PALIN

G athered here, for the benefit of Oxfam and its work, are a series of vivid accounts of people and places which not only show the wonder of the world but also the wealth of fine travel writers working today. The theme behind each contribution is, quite loosely, meetings, or to put it more poetically, encounters.

When I set out on my BBC series Around the World in Eighty Days in 1988 I was nervous. Not so much of the world outside, but of what I would make of it. Ahead of me were the giants of broadcast travel the James Camerons, Charles Wheelers and the Alan Whickers. Masters of the concise and the memorable. I had also been commissioned to write a book of my experiences on the journey, and all I could think of was the daunting legacy of great descriptive writers like Bruce Chatwin and Jan Morris, and my personal favourite, Norman Lewis, who used bone-dry humour to lure his readers into all sorts of weird and dangerous places. As if this literary legacy wasnt intimidating enough, there was also Jules Verne, whod written Around the World in Eighty Days already.

As my journey went on and I struggled to find a single fresh word to apply to sunsets, Venice or another morning on the Mediterranean, it struck me that perhaps Id been born just too late and that everything that could be said had already been said. Then, in the third week of the journey, everything changed. We found ourselves far from well-trodden Europe, confined for seven days and nights on a dhow on the Persian Gulf. It had no radar or radio and of the crew of fifteen Gujaratis, only one had a smattering of English. It was wonderful. I couldnt fill the pages of my notebook fast enough. The unfolding relationship between our BBC crew, high-tech and largely helpless, and the dhow crew, low-tech and indispensable, was one of the most extraordinary and unusual encounters of the