Departures & Arrivals - Softcover

Eric Newby got the travel bug from his parents, who would leave him with a housekeeper for months at a time when they went off to market their fashion "productions." But he took the habit farther afield and for far longer than anyone could have imagined, and in the process developed an audience devoted to his witty travel tales. Now in his 80s, the venerable English travel writer still pedals a cycle or bounces across a desert on a jeep whenever the opportunity presents itself, for, as he notes, it might well not recur. In this selection of short pieces, Newby focuses on his most enduring memories of departures and arrivals, beginning with his regular walks "up to the bend and back" with his mother in his childhood village of Barnes, England. With abundant detail and his trademark self-deprecating humor, he takes his readers on one of the last journeys of the Orient Express, into the world's biggest opal field in South Australia (where miners live in the "unimaginable horror of corrugated iron huts" in 140° temperatures), and on to Tuscany for the mad two-minute horse race known as the Palio where horses and riders are regularly maimed or killed. In his 70th year alone, Newby cycled from Rotterdam to Dijon, traveled to northern Rajasthan for the full moon of Kartik, when tens of thousands of Hindus try to bathe in the sacred lake at the same time, and then to the biggest cattle fair in all of Asia, where he describes in delightful detail the twice-daily bathing of the elephants. Two years later he decided to ride his bike along the meridian two degrees west of Greenwich in bleak November weather because it was the only time of year he could stay at bed & breakfasts without advance reservations.

The short essays cover lots of territory at a rapid pace and, as a result, are not as satisfying as his classics, such as A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines. But he makes up for the lack of length and depth with a brilliant selection of telling scenes and the amused irony with which he views the world and himself. During a visit to China, he irreverently describes the embalmed Chairman Mao this way: "Lying there, with only his face visible, he looked like an over-sized omelet from the McDonald's across the way at the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square." As for himself, he's busy being overtaken on his made-to-order touring bicycle by elderly Dutch ladies "mounted on bikes that looked like two harps welded together." With his ironic and endearing sense of humor and his willingness to go absolutely anywhere, Newby makes the perfect traveling companion. --Lesley Reed

From an open boat ride down the Ganges (pushing in the water most of the way) to long-distance cycling through Europe to exploring the Forbidden City in China, the tales of Eric Newby's travels are always entertaining in his recollections of highlights from an eventful life. He transplants the reader to all manner of eclectic terrain: from early childhood adventures among the shops, streets and eccentrics inhabiting the dark London suburb of his upbringing, to an elephant fair in India; from the faded glamour of the Orient Express to a roughneck settlement of opal miners in Australia where men carrying large amounts of cash travel armed, but have still been known to disappear.
Whether he is putting heart and soul into building the perfect grotto in his Devon garden with his wife and the stonemason, rambling around a semi-abandoned and despoiled Calabria, or wrestling with the logistics of baby-rearing, both existing and new readers will enjoy the exuberance and humor that Departures and Arrivals has to offer.