Books to Read While Travelling - if you have time!!

An ideal way to ensure a busy and enjoyabble travellling holiday is to take along plenty of books. Because if one does not, many ideal opportunuties to read, arise. So while we were at the Rocks, Sydney we ducked into our favourite bookshop to stock up. As well as today’s latest popular books there are titles by Australia’s most esteemed authors. However I have found that short, easy to read works are better when busy travelling from place to place around England, Ireland and Scotland, as we were, on this adventure. After seeing the movie ‘Kapote’ in which Kapote himself spent many years hounding a prisoner for the ‘truth’ before he was executed, I was most interested to read some of his stories and came across ’Breakfast at Tiffanys’ amongst other short stories. Kapote’s written style is flowing, easy to read and immediately captures the reader in the lives, personalities and relationships of his characters. You may think one is crazy to spend a fortune to see an exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, about Scott and his ill fated expedition to the South Pole. As a child I learnt about his failure to be first to the South Pole, but not much else. So it was most interesting to read about all the significant scienific information Scott’s crew gathered and the impact it has had on Antarctican knowledge today. I was delighted to be introduced to an author, Sara Wheeler who spent quite some time in Antarctica, gathering research for her book Terra Incognita - Travels in Antarctica. Upon an assignment to Chile in 1991 she was abliged to visit the Antarctic Penisnula which the Chileans regard as part of their country. As she stood on a plateau of whiteness stretching to eternity she knew that she and antarctica would have a very close mutually beneficial infinity and Terra Incognita was an outcome of this moment of realzation. This entertaining, easy to read book demonstrate the massive amount of research Sara undertook and by the time I have finished the book I believe I will have gained a massive amount of well rounded and intimate knowledge of this imsporing continent and the people associated with it, over the years. For those who enjoy boating stories, Swatchways Magic, by my friend Charles Scoones and Paul Antrobus is a very entertaining and easy read. Around 50 years ago Paul Griffiths cruised all the nooks and crannies of the Swatchways river estuaries in a small boat, documenting all its idiosyncracies in his book, The Magic of the Swatchways. In 2000 Charles and Paul, who both grew up sailing in these waters, followed Griffiths’ travels comparing then to now. While little has changed, the anecdotes are told in such a way leaving the reader with the feeling of timeless and intimate familiarity of the area.