Journey to the River Sea | Eva Ibbotson
The first time I read this book, I was about 8 years old. It captivated my imagination and transported me away from where I was making me feel like an intrepid explorer. This was really one of the first travel books that I had ever read, and despite the fact it is purely fictional Eva had spent years creating this book to the best of her knowledge, after years of research and it was born out of her own inspiration from a friend who had travelled the Brazilian Amazon. The book features a small girl and her sudden transition from a sheltered and privileged London life to a full immersion into the wild Amazon and a not so nice family. Her sense of adventure grows and she comes to learn about the people and the place, finding friends in inconspicuous places and beauty in things she was scared of, before arriving. This book is both exciting and intriguing and was one of the reasons that from an early age I was captivated by the idea of travel and the variety of different cultures.
Heart of Darkness | Joseph Konrad
At A-Level English we were doing our creative writing assignments which had to be based on 2 books written about The Congo in very different times. Heart of Darkness is the original inspiration for Apocalypse Now. It is about a man's life as an ivory transporter down the Congo river and a developing obsession; the novel is both dark and rapidly changes tone taking a turn for the worse, the language is sinewy and eery and creates an uneasy tone that leaves you thinking about after reading. Although not explicitly an inspiration for travel, as I wouldn’t typically like to have a journey like his, it opened my eyes to how different other sides of the world are, the writing itself captivated me and inspired my love of writing now.
Blood River | Tim Butcher
Again another book from A-levels which is a non-fiction account of Tim Butcher’s journey into a country damaged by years of civil war and foreign failures sticks in my mind. The beauty, danger and friends he finds on this journey whilst recreating H.M. Stanley's famous expedition along the Congo are truly inspiring and strikingly honest. Each chapter lights up your imagination and submerges you in the pages as his expedition’s pace heightens. It is humbling to read and has driven me to search and plan more difficult journeys away from the beaten path, regardless of how ‘dangerous’ or ‘risky’ they may be.
My Family and Other Animals | Gerald Durrell
As I’m sure you will hear in posts to come I spent my summer of 2016 in Greece with an organisation called Archelon saving sea turtles and in my down time didn’t have a lot to do so I ordered ‘My family and Other Animals’ from Amazon thinking it was a scientific book about wildlife. A week after delivery I had finished the whole book and was ready to read it again. It is a humbling book of memories from his childhood growing up on Corfu, all the animals he found and the journeys he took around his new home, his eccentric family and the even more eccentric islanders and a huge array of pets such as toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, bats, and butterflies that he introduces to this exciting new home. It oozes an overall seemingly bohemian lifestyle that despite appearing chaotic excited me more so for the prospect of living abroad in my life.