Normally, when you really, really hate something in the beginning, you eventually like it (eventually).
I picked up Paul Theroux’s book, The Great Railway Bazaar recently and was immediately sucked into it. It’s a story about one man’s solitary (but rarely alone) train journey that starts in London, goes down through Turkey, unto Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Vietnam, Japan and finally the Soviet Union. It’s a great and inspiring book that every hardcore traveller should read. I personally am not as hardcore as this, but it is nice to live vicariously through another person’s experience.
What’s nice is, Theroux has actually already been to the Philippines and his article about it is still availabe online here
http://outside.away.com/outside/magazine/0998/9809islands.html
Reading Theroux will give you a serious case of wanderlust. Which is pretty good when I expected him to be a pretentious writer at first. It is quite amazing that he does his journey’s alone. I have never been entranced by the idea of travelling solo but it seems that a camaraderie is built by travelling alone. People will talk to you when they normally wouldn’t if you were in a group. But backpacking communities tend to be terribly loquacious to begin with. Besides trains, it seems like Theroux also took to kayaking which he wrote about in The Happy Isles of Oceania (I do not own or have read.)
I’ve also read The Lonely Planet Story by Tony and Maureen Wheeler. These two travelled by car and what not from London to Sydney, wrote a book about it and eventually started the Lonely Planet empire. Either way, it’s a great book. I have dreams one day of driving from Hong Kong to London.
Both books I got from Fully Booked, The Lonely Planet Story is available in probably any Fully Booked branch (or Power Books for that matter, and even National Bookstore!). The Great Railway Bazaar I found (only copy) in the Power Plant branch. Fully Booked is a great bookstore but it’s not as complete as Barnes and Noble (or maybe even Kinokuniya). They would best be able to fill up this gap by having a counter where you can actually order books through them (parang like the way CD Warehouse used to fill the CD gap here in the ‘pines.)
Fully Booked High Street (Serendra) also has copies of The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria. With this book and The Lexus and The Olive Tree, you will be able to capture the zeitgeist of globalization that is sweeping through the world right now. I can not more highly recommend a book right now that you should pick up than The Post American World.
OTHER RAMBLINGS:
Also I would recommend The Case for Goliath, but that book I have never seen here. I did see it once in multiple copies in the basement of the NYU student library but that’s the first world and we still live in our first world country with a third world distribution network. I wonder when we will be incorporated more completely into the global supply chain?
It would be nice to be able to get books, movies, concerts on time if at all without having to resort to piracy, Amazon, flying to other countries or relatives in other countries.
