I read an excellent book about Mongolia a couple weeks ago by Jasper Becker, called "Mongolia: Travels in the Untamed Land." Becker was a Western journalist based in Beijing, and one of the first to cross the border from China when Mongolian communism fell apart in 1991. 

The book covers many aspects of Mongolia, from obscure bits of history to the observations of other earlier travelers, but for me the greatest thing was the memories it brought back. 

Becker's writing is fresh and his descriptions of landscape are vivid. It seemed like many of the places he wrote about hadn't changed at all from the time of his visit to the month I spent traveling the country in 2002. It remains one of the best places I've ever been, and I still dream of going back.

I still remember the way salty tea soaked life back into our wilted bodies after half a day's drive in the jeep. The mutton smell inside a ger [Mongolian felt tent]. The perpetual dust cough we all had from breathing in the roads and jeep tracks. And the taste of mutton, which was all we had to eat.

Back in Ulan Baator, I ate most of my meals at a guanz close to the apartment where I'd rented a room. 

The menu was all Cyrillic, but there really wasn't much to choose from. I remember the first time I went in there with my friends Therese and Katarina. We stood at the counter scratching our heads until a fat Mongolian babushka rose from a nearby table and offered to interpret.

I pointed at the first item.

"That is meat and rice," she said in a thick Russian-sounding accent.

"And this?"

"That is meat and potatoes and rice."

"And that one?"

"That is meat."

I pointed at the last item.

She shook her head, slow and sad. "You can't eat that."

We ordered.

"To drink? Mongolian tea?"

"Of course."

And then she thrust a chubby finger at each of the Swedes and shouted, "And you? And you?"

Mongolian food has the dubious reputation of being among the world's worst cuisines. Not because it tastes foul, but because most people find it incredibly bland. There just aren't a lot of choices. Milky salty tea with floating chunks of mutton fat and hair. Mutton cooked in five variations: soup, a greasy pancake, greasy dumplings, with greasy flour noodles, or with rice (also greasy). Potatoes or cabbage were the only vegetables I ever saw.

I loved it from the beginning. Where else would you find cigarettes and chewing gum on every restaurant menu? And meat salad, whatever the hell that was?

On one excursion into the countryside, Becker writes: "During the whole week of traveling, I never tired of just looking. The landscape changed with every mile, the pure bright light caught, twisted and refracted an almost theatrical display turning rocks and lakes a thousand hues."

And that was one of my favourite memories of the country. It's a place where the only possible answer to "where are you going" is "...over there."

I lost all track of time as our jeep bounced across the countryside. Mongolia unrolled outside the window. I watched it roll past. I smelled it through the triangle window. I was happy. 

Driving in Mongolia was an approximation. Distances were huge. The map was a work of fiction that bore little relation to reality. And the "roads" -- jeep tracks worn into the earth by the passage of previous vehicles -- were so bad it could take all day to go twenty kilometers.

Such a place was sure to infuriate "sightseers" with a list to check off, a detailed itinerary of lunch breaks and dinner breaks and knowledge of where one would sleep that night, and even an accurate knowledge of where one was most of the time. Don't go to Mongolia if you expect those things, or if you need to be entertained.

Mongolia is what you experience along the way.

In a section about the Gobi, Becker quotes American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews: "Below us lay that stupendous relief map of ravines and gorges; in front was a limitless stretch of undulating plain. I knew then that I really stood upon the edge of the greatest plateau in all the world and that it could only be Mongolia."

Andrews's quote brought back so much. I remember very clearly the moment we reached the desert.

My friend Therese and I climbed to a high point on the rocky mountainside behind our tents to watch the sunset. After two long days of driving, we were on the edge of the true Gobi. It stretched out flat to the south and west as far as I could see, and its emptiness was so vast that I couldn't believe it was not the entire world.

The great orange ball of the sunk sank into the desert and was gone. As darkness fell, the pinprick lights of the little town we had passed through came on in the distance to the north. A dozen flickering lights at the base of a low line of hills. That was the only trace of man in this landscape. 

And then the generator of the little town gave one last cough and went out, and the lights faded into silence and were gone.

I'm just back from a short job in Glynco, GA, followed by a few days of filming in Florida. It was a steamy week of early morning / late afternoon shoots and midday business meetings on the beach. We were scorched by the sands, gouged by the shells, plagued by mosquitos and swarmed by biting ants. And that was just the first day...

But I've returned to my desk and I'm ready to entertain you.

We'll get back to travel stories soon. I've also got some cool new books to tell you about, both classics and new stuff, and some great music to shove in your ipod for the road.

In the meantime, reader questions continue to flow in. Let's have a look at one more as I unpack from the latest trip and figure out where I left my pen...

Dave O. from America asked:

What was your most memorable experience?

There are so many. Each trip is special, and each offers its own unique memories that are cherished separately and cannot be ranked or compared. 

That being said, there are a few special moments I think about often.

Traveling on a Nicaraguan freighter from the coastal town of Bluefields to the Corn Islands. 

Beyond the sheltering hills of Bluefields Bay, the morning sun wrapped us in golden warmth. A gentle salt breeze ruffled our sun-bleached hair. The sea was the colour of so many picture postcards: a blue so pure you'd think it was faked. To aft, beyond our foaming wake, the broad reach of the endless tangled shoreline was gradually revealed with every chug and twist of the prop. The emerald jungle of the Mosquito Coast stretched to the horizon, promising more of the same for as far as we could imagine.

I rolled over and lay on a woodpile, my elbows and chin on the ship's rounded rail, looking straight down over the bow. The boat rose and fell with hypnotic repetitiveness over broad rolling waves. With each downward slide the prow cleaved the sea and spray crashed up, dusting my face with a gentle salt-smelling mist. The rhythm was all-absorbing... Ksssh... Ksssh... Kssssssh... and I was drawn into its spell.

Looking back, it's possibly the only time in my life I've felt complete and utter happiness--and been fully conscious of it. At that moment our world felt absolutely limitless, full of possibility.

Mongolia, the south Gobi desert. We'd been wandering through a remote region for the past week by jeep. We'd gotten lost, and our driver decided to take a two-day short cut across a treacherous untraveled expanse to meet up with another route east. 

We camped that night in a rocky hollow. We'd eaten the last of our food, and we had only enough water for morning coffee. I pitched my tent a short walk away from my companions, and I lay half out of the door facing up. The desert air was unmarred by moisture and free of ambient light - and there wasn't another soul for hundreds of miles. The Milky Way cut a gauzy swath across the deep black background, and cold stars sparkled in layer upon layer, fading out eons beyond antediluvian time. In all my life I've never seen such a sky. The brightness of the full moon woke me at 3am. I thought it was dawn. 

My Mongolia represents freedom, wandering, and self-contained sufficiency. When asked where you're going, the only possible answer is to gesture toward the distant horizon and say, "Over there." 

Island hopping along Croatia's Adriatic Coast. I was traveling self-contained with a car and a tent, sleeping where night found me and swimming as I pleased. 

On the shore of stony islands, the sun dried salt to a thin powdery crust on my skin. I sat under olive trees, eating a rustic lunch of bread, hard cheese, and coarse local wine drunk straight from the bottle. My backdrop was the bleached bony spine of the mainland that towers over the islands and the sea, and in the distance the slow clonk of sheep bells.

I learned on that trip that I'm drawn to the landscape and culture of the Mediterranean by some strange form of magnetism. The writer Lawrence Durrell would have called it the "spirit of place." It felt like going home.

I've come up with a new interactive feature that I hope you'll enjoy. Are you itching to find out about the exotic world of travel writing, desperate for hot hints on destinations and money saving travel tips, or just bored and looking for a monkey to prod with a stick? Well now's your chance...

I call it "Reader's Questions." Okay, yeah, that's pretty lame. But if I called it ober dictum you wouldn't know what the hell I was talking about.

Anyway.... it's a fun and occasionally insightful new feature that we'll slot in from time to time between travel stories.

If you've got a pressing question you'd like to ask, please post it to the comments, contact me by email through my website, or get it to me via Facebook or Twitter. I'll answer your most interesting questions right here on the blog.

We'll get the ball rolling with a whiff of danger...

Jill from Ontario, Canada asked: 

Do you enjoy risk-taking? What was your most frightening experience? 

I did jump out of airplanes a few times when I was 18  -- my first three times in a plane, actually -- but I'm not motivated by the pursuit of adrenalin sports. I'm not averse to risk, but I don't need it to get a rush either. It's not danger that attracts me but life.

Most things that seem frightening really aren't so in the moment. When things happen they happen fast, and you have no choice but to take action, to shift immediately into solution mode. 

For example, my first time in a plane I jumped out with a parachute. When it opened the chute was all twisted up, one of three problems short of catastrophic failure that they'd told us about in the very brief ground school I attended the day before. I never thought about it at all, about the ground rushing up or the speed of my descent. I simply took note of the problem and immediately began to untangle it. We'd been trained, I'd gone over and over it, and it was time to act.

It's tough to think of a time when I was truly and completely frightened in the moment. I suppose that, just as the most challenging aspects of travel for me are the mental ones, the fearful aspects are as well. 

In that regard, the most frightening experience I can think of offhand was my arrival in Panama City. It was my first time alone on the road, and I'd purchased a one-way ticket into Panama and out of Belize so I'd have no way to cut the journey short. That first night, sitting there completely alone in a tiny hotel room, in a place where I didn't speak the language, with the street noise - loud engines, shouting people, what sounded like gunshots - coming in through the window, I realized I'd gotten in over my head. Never in my life had I felt so alone, and I didn't know how I'd make it through. All I could see were the months and months that stretched ahead. It was all a blank. Total uncertainty. 

Think about what that means. Our lives are composed of routines we take for granted - work times, school times, TV shows, regular meals, brushing one's teeth... These comforting routines lend shape to our lives. They give us some sort of structured reality, and they connect us to the lives of those around us. I'd severed all that in a single stroke. I had no idea what the next day would hold, or even the next hour. And it completely terrified me. Of course that turmoil passed with the light of dawn, but it was a long, long night.

In hindsight this was all just a part of learning to let go. And I think that's one of the greatest lessons of travel. Learning to accept things as they are. Not imposing your own pre-conceived agenda on a situation you can't control. Knowing when to sit back and wait, and when to follow those paths that the Road will show you if only you're patient enough to listen.

A lone mud-spattered researcher in torn khaki pants and sweat-stained sleeveless t-shirt kneels in the dirt in front of a makeshift shelter, carefully injecting formalin into a toad to halt the onset of decay. Tiny sweat bees cloud around her head, crawling into her nose and ears and getting into the corners of her eyes. She's so concentrated on her work that she barely notices them. Suddenly, a man from the nearby Pygmy village bursts into camp.

"Madame, there is a snake in the village!"

She leaps to her feet, pausing only to stuff a snake bag into the waistband of her pants and grab a snake hook, and they run off through the forest in pursuit.

For herpetologist Kate Jackson that's a good day of fieldwork in the Republic of Congo. This and many more dramatic stories are recounted in her book, Mean and Lowly Things. When asked why she decided to write such a deeply personal account of the challenges and tribulations of fieldwork in remote settings, she answers with typical aplomb, "Mostly to raise money for my next expedition."

Dig deeper and you soon discover that Jackson, an assistant professor at Whitman College, passionately believes in the epigram from Aristotle that opens her book: "To understand the world, we must understand mean and lowly things." Every page of her story breathes the excitement of discovery, and she returns again and again to the message that there is indeed great value in studying toads and snakes. "Only about two percent of all the money that is contributed to wildlife organizations goes to amphibians and reptiles," she says. "People need to understand why they're important." 

Jackson has been fascinated by 'mean and lowly things' for as long as she can remember. "As a child, I originally thought I would be a vet or a zookeeper," she says, until, on a high-school career day, she was shown the collections of the herpetology department of the Royal Ontario Museum. "I'd never seen anything like it," she says, her voice still coloured with wonder. "A new world opened up before me." The experience, and subsequent undergraduate work at the Smithsonian Institution, revealed to her the importance of collecting and identifying specimens. When the bigger picture comes together, she explains, the interrelationship of all living things and the niche each species occupies in the planetary ecosystem can be understood. It is then that individual species can be protected and balance maintained. 

For someone always interested in exploration, a longing to study the real thing in the wild was inevitable. In 1997, Jackson organized her own expedition to a remote field camp deep in the forests of Congo. The skills needed on such a venture weren't taught in graduate school, they had to be discovered for oneself through trial and error. And when dealing with venomous snakes, errors can be costly. 

Her initial foray was marred by civil war and a medical evacuation, but she came away with "an altogether irrational longing to return," which she did two more times, once in 2005 and again the following year. The 2005 expedition was another rocky one, plagued by seemingly insurmountable cultural barriers. "There was no go-between person. Just me and a group of very poor, uneducated villagers who had no understanding of my culture or where I came from," she says. "I never managed to break down that barrier." Still, it was a success work-wise. She collected approximately 130 specimens of rare snakes, lizards and frogs, including at least one species that may have been previously unknown to science.

Her 2006 expedition to the same region was a very different journey. "I think I managed to breach the cultural gap this time thanks in large part to the presence of Ange and Lise," she says, speaking of the two Congolese graduate students who accompanied her. "They were scientists who understood my world, and therefore they could interpret me to the villagers. They also knew how to negotiate with the village chiefs for the supplies and the assistants we needed." Together, they collected a large number of specimens and laid a framework of good relations that Jackson says will be helpful on future trips. 

For Jackson, the lure that keeps drawing her back to Africa is that "no one has ever done any herpetology in the north [of Congo]. It's basically undiscovered territory." Her voice drops a notch and trembles with excitement. "Central Africa is sort of a black hole for herpetology," she says. "There are tons of places to go where no herpetologist has ever been and where, within a couple hundred kilometres, you find no overlap in species. It is that diverse." For the explorer, there is no more intriguing reward.

And like most explorers, Jackson's work can mean enduring physical hardship. In her Congo camp, she slept beneath a patched orange tarpaulin on a simple groundsheet, covered in a mosquito net: a situation that caused her Bantu guide to quit because the living conditions were too harsh. The food prepared by her cook was nearly inedible. In her book she describes bland manioc that tasted like "a cross between a chunk of wood and an overcooked potato," and soup that "often includes rotting fish, which they serve cold for breakfast if I don't finish it at dinner." The smoked fish had been prepared weeks before, and it was often infested with maggots. 

Her stories of insect infestations are particularly gruesome. She describes occasions when swarms of biting ants filled her clothing and covered everything in sight, and termites that ate large holes in the tarp of her meager shelter. In what is perhaps her most disgusting story, she, Lise and Ange developed large painful bumps all over their bodies, which turned out to be maggots. Flies had laid eggs in clothing that had been hung out to dry, which later hatched into tiny maggots that burrowed into their skin. "Every time the maggot moves, it feels as if a large ant is biting you, but when you turn to swat it there's nothing there, except a lump getting gradually larger and larger," Jackson writes. Treatment involved smothering the maggots with a strip of surgical tape, and then squeezing them out by force. "I keep meaning to save one," she writes. "I long to have one with wings for my collection, but it's really hard not to pick at them."

For Jackson, it was just another day in the field. "The physical discomforts never bothered me so much," she says. "I will tolerate discomfort to do important work." What could be remotely appealing about conducting work of any kind under such trying conditions? "My state of mind is different when I'm out there. I'm not worried about getting a paper done and submitted on time, or catching the next bus, or getting a reply to an email. I forget all that. I love the sheer excitement of the field, all the things there is to discover."  

Jackson dismisses the significant dangers of her occupation just as characteristically. "Everyone thinks of my fieldwork as being dangerous because of the snakes," she writes. "But I've said time and time again that mundane dangers--malaria, murder, crashes of small planes--are much more likely." Such a thing derailed her 1997 trip when a tiny scratch on her leg came into contact with swamp water while out collecting. Five days later, her temperature shot to 104 F, and nothing in her first aid kit could halt the upward progression of creeping redness and swelling. Her trip came to an end with "a medical evacuation, by small plane from a lumber company seven hours downstream by pirogue [dugout canoe]," followed by 10 days in a hospital in Cameroon.

Snakebites might not worry Jackson, but in her book she recounts a frighteningly close call with a forest cobra on her 2006 expedition. She was left her wondering if she was about to die an unpleasant death among strangers, hundreds of miles from any possible help. "People have a hard time believing that I wasn't afraid at that moment," Jackson says. "Actually, I was profoundly glad it had happened to me and not to one of the graduate students I was responsible for." 

On the topic of fear in general, she say: "I often feel fear in advance of these expeditions. While the details are being sorted out, I sometimes sit back and wonder if this will be my last one, if I could be killed on this trip. But once you're there and you're in the details of it you don't feel fear. You've been trained for this, and so you're focused on the moment and on taking action. Fear only comes before or after." She returns to the cobra experience. "Few people know that that [cobra] was almost the last snake I caught in the wild. Not just on that trip, but in my entire life. I caught one more [a venomous Night Viper] in Brazzaville just before I flew home." She pauses, reliving the moment. "I was really glad I did it. I wouldn't have wanted to come back to Canada not having done that--wondering if I still could."  

That experience would be enough to make most people rethink their career, but after sinking into a thoughtful quiet moment while retelling the tale of the cobra, Jackson shifts back to high gear. "You know about the chytrid fungus, don't you? It's a strange fungal disease that's affecting amphibians all over the world. It's already wiped out frogs and toads in Australia and South America. Well, for whatever reason, this fungus has never been tested for in Africa. Can you believe that? It may very well have originated there." She thumps her desk for emphasis, and it carries down the phone line as a dull thud. "I've already got people catching specimens and swabbing for samples, and when we go back to the forest in June..." She's off and running again, nearly breathless with excitement, any notion of danger and discomfort completely gone, eclipsed by the wonders of discovery and the thrill of the chase.

For more information, visit Kate Jackson's website, and pick up a copy of Mean and Lowly Things (Harvard University Press). 

[This profile piece was originally published in the Going Hard column of Outpost Magazine, March/April 2008]

Lastovo: isolated Adriatic island of jagged hills clad in holm oak and aleppo pine, where the sea laps sunbleached stones with tongue translucent blue. 

Settled by Illyrians and later controlled by Rome, over the centuries it was destroyed by Venice for harboring pirates, joined the Dubrovnik Republic, and passed through the hands of Napoleonic France, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, to finally become a part of independent Croatia. 

Unlike other island settlements, Lastovo Town faces inland. It's stone buildings cling to a natural amphitheater whose basin is fertile with olives and vines. Earlier settlements consolidated on this more defensible site when the people abandoned piracy and turned inward to a life of agricultural self-sufficiency. That same independent spirit is still evident in Lastovo islanders today.

It's a quiet place of lazy heat haze days sipping cappuccino and soaking up village life. Outside a café, an old man in a patched jacket shouts insults at passing youngsters: "Cut your hair Stjepan! You look like a girl!" The other old men chuckle and cough. Stjepan's defense is to talk back in a normal voice as he continues to walk, resisting the urge to look back over his shoulder.

On Lastovo's south side, rocky beaches and barren hills abound with hidden coves - the perfect place for a private swim. I spend my island afternoons plunged in the briny deep, or in sun-soaked sophistry on shore. At sundown, hitchhike back across to my room in Lučica - a narrow inlet of half-abandoned 15th Century stone houses, where we wash down seafood dinners with house wine. And it really is house wine - each house makes their own.

I'm alone in my compartment as the train leaves Slovenia and enters the broad rolling fields of Hungary. The dark blue seat upholstery smells of dust, and the nautical gloss of the walls have faded to matte.

I see "Magyar" go past on a rusted sign, and I'm reminded of a stamp collecting album someone gave me as a child. It was filled with names like "GDR" and "Magyar Republic", names I couldn't find on a map. Names that sounded so strange. Now here it is outside my window. Did I ever imagine I would see such places? Or did I ever doubt that I wouldn't?

Deeper into Hungary, the train to Budapest keeps changing directions. One minute we're traveling forward, and half an hour later we're going backwards. An hour later it will change again. It feels as though we're tacking like a sailboat into the wind, approaching our destination obliquely. Or perhaps they just keep forgetting things and have to go back?

Hungary is a country where the people look just like the etchings on their money. I see that crazy looking guy from the 1000 forint note walk past my compartment again and again. I slip a few notes from my wallet to compare. He's dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket, but otherwise the same.  

There's something about a train that never fails to fuel my writing. I don't know if it's the way a train snakes across vast open land, the metrical clack of the wheels or the grinding of the steel. It's all right there before me in a gently rocking panorama, and all I have to do is take it all in.

The land as it unrolls like a film matches my thoughts, and I roll back through them, peeling away years to connect events into patterns and condense thoughts into notebook words.

I watch the rain bead on the glass and roll down the pale reflection of my face. As I stare through this transparent counterfeit of myself, I realize that I've always lived my life in compartments, with walls of various types and thicknesses, a variety of opacities and stained-glass stains. It began as an antidote to the fatigue that comes with always being the odd one out. But now I contain so many compartments it's become difficult to recognize my core. Which one is truest? Are any of them real? 

I uncovered that core once in Central America, and I managed to free it for a brief period of time. But now it feels like I'm living two types of life: the ideal sort of world that I would like to experience, the one I express in my writing. And the quieter, lonelier life I actually lead in between. 

I begin to wonder if, the more I write and the better I get, if I'm putting the best of myself into my writing, and if what's left over is what's left for my day to day life?

These are the kinds of things I like to think about on trains.

Vagabond Dreams Outtakes are "deleted scenes" from my book. Think of them as a "Special Features" disc for a DVD yet to be invented. This incident took place in Belize...

Belize City was a bit like Bluefields on the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua: a seedy place with an aura of decay. But it didn't feel like Central America. The musical lilt of Caribbean English had already displaced the Spanish I'd grown used to, and that Latin timelessness was missing, as were the Spanish colonial buildings and the social hunting ground of the plazas. Belize had a different sort of timelessness: a lazy island grace of rusting corrugated roofs and gap-toothed smiles.

Water taxi engines fired, and we motored out of the dirty estuary and into the sea. Piles of luggage filled the centre of the open boat. Passengers squeezed onto benches that lined both sides. Only three were locals. There were no backpackers; the country wasn't quite cheap enough for them. I was deep behind the lines of White Leg territory.

Three Brits sat in the bow. Their close-cropped hair and angry red sunburns gave them away -- that and the fact that they were thoroughly trashed at 8am. Belize still hosts a small British military contingent. Prior to independence in 1981 it was British Honduras; a centuries-old thorn in the side of the Spanish Main, founded by pirates and logwood cutters. The territory is still shown as a province on Guatemalan maps.

The Belize I saw was little more than a carbon copy of every other overexploited Caribbean vacationland. And it marked the end of my road -- but only for this journey. I knew by then that the terminus of each trip was a fallow period, when the lessons learned broke free and rose to the surface. I needed to think through those lessons of my Central American road before they got buried beneath the day to day routines of home. And so I stopped in Belize not to observe or to experience or to sightsee, but to buy time.

The water was transparent blue, and the tropical sun warmed my face and legs, inducing a comfortable torpor. I breathed deeply of the fresh salt air as we bounced through light chop that peppered my clothing with gentle spray, and I slept.

An hour later I was among coral islands. I jumped out at the wooden pier of Caye Caulker. The next stop was a larger island with roads and cars, geared to wealthy package tourists. I wanted to be able to walk everywhere.

A few sandy roads threaded the little village, but cars had been prohibited. Electric golf carts hummed as they rolled past at pedestrian speed. Wooden stilt-houses were painted yellow and blue. There must have been a time when they were vibrant and cheerful, but they'd since become blistered and cracked. The faded buildings resembled the people in a way: they'd let themselves go in the listless tropical heat. Island girls in calico shuffled down sandy streets with a lazy swirling gait. Rasta wannabes with matted dreds and knit caps loafed by the pier drinking beer and selling weed. The white legs of tourists flashed like ice shards in the sun, with souvenir t-shirts proudly displaying their past travels and origins.

The main strip was lined with open-air restaurants and bars. Trinket shops sold Guatemalan handicrafts at inflated prices. A profusion of dive shops offered packaged SCUBA and snorkel excursions to all the same places. After Corn Island, I couldn't help but feel disappointed.

I found a cheap room at Lucy's Guesthouse on a side street. It took some searching. Lucy was a wrinkled black lady with a ready smile and a low chuckling laugh, and I liked her immediately. Her guesthouse was quiet. The party places were further down the strip. She placed a deep wooden armchair on the veranda in front of my room, and a hammock swung limp in the sandy yard. I knew right away where I would spend my island evenings.

Places like Belize made me feel a little ridiculous. Locals pandered and deferred to white trash North Americans, the bottom of the suburb-dwelling TV generation back home. Down there they're wealthy. Bob and Martha, obese beyond belief, waddle around in tent-like Bermuda shorts; they argue and fight over twenty cents for a crummy whittled handicraft and think their bargaining quite shrewd. It's a microcosm of vapid Western pop culture, consumer cannibalism garnished with quaint dark-skinned locals and musical accents. But the locals all want what the tourists have.

Moments in those places shattered the aura of adventure that had permeated my travels at the far edges of the map. They reminded me of the bland homogenization that's infecting the globe. I couldn't buy in to the illusion of paradise those places tried to present, and I felt guilty to be a Westerner.

I first read about Jasper Evans in a book by the explorer John Hare called Shadows Across the Sahara. 

Hare set out to retrace an ancient trade route from Lake Chad to Tripoli, a three month south-to-north crossing of the Sahara -- 1,462 miles of barren desert known in the days of slavery as a place strewn with the carcasses of men and camels. The route was last crossed by Hanns Vischer in 1906, and no one had thought to attempt it since.

John Hare needed a camel expert, and he called on Jasper Evans. Born and raised in Kenya but of English descent, "Japper" was old settler stock, a farmer and camel breeder with deep roots in the land, and old school values when it came to travel. A National Geographic article about that same trip opens with Japper lying calmly on his back while another expedition member cut encrusted sand out of his eyeball with a razor blade. He was 76 at the time. Guys like him were a vanishing breed, and I wanted to be cast in that mold.

I next encountered Japper in another John Hare book, The Lost Camels of Tartary, where his skills had been called on for an expedition into uncharted regions of China's Gashun Gobi.

The book also made mention of a "camel handling manual" written by Evans. That single line immediately caught my attention. Practical camel information is hard to come by, and so this book was something I had to get my hands on.

As luck would have it, I was able to interview John Hare for the Going Hard column of Outpost magazine. When I asked him if copies of this mysterious camel manual still existed, Hare suggested I write to Mr. Evans and passed me his address.

I don't think I ever expected to receive a reply, but 6 months later a wrinkled blue airmail letter covered in Kenyan stamps arrived in the post. And this began my 3 year correspondence with one of the world's leading camel authorities.

Japper had one copy of his manual left, and he would arrange to have it delivered to me via a friend -- he wouldn't trust it to the post office. And no matter how many times I asked, he refused to accept payment for it.

His letter came at a time when I was struggling to carve out my niche as a writer. To receive such encouragement from someone of Jasper Evans legendary stature meant a great deal to me. I was a camel novice with just two expeditions under my belt, but he took me seriously and expressed genuine interest in my travels. He wrote:

"You have done some very interesting trips and I'm very glad to know that you have a real feeling for the wonderful camel. Apart from exotic trips with John Hare I have done a good many thousand miles with them in Northern Kenya, mostly in inaccessible places to motor vehicles, always with huge appreciation and affection."

I was surprised by his kindness and warmth. In that first long letter Jasper also took the time to scribble down a list of books: "I enclose a slip with titles of books that I have found really interesting and by people who really understood camels. Some I'm afraid probably unobtainable." That small list saved me months of research.

It took nearly 3 years for the camel manual to reach me. I tried to coordinate my trips to Europe with those of his friends, but schedules have a way of changing, and they never really line up.

Each time he wrote me, Jasper would open with an apology that he hadn't forgotten about me or the manual. And each time I had to smile at his sincerity. I was just happy to receive another letter and to hear more of his story.

"I wonder if you did your trip to the Sahara?" he wrote. "I would very much like to hear about it if you have."

I can't tell you how encouraging it was to be taken seriously by a traveler and explorer of his stature, especially when no one else believed in what I was doing. And I think Japper was happy to know that someone out there still loved this method of travel simply for its own sake.

"My big regret," he wrote, "is that having recently had my 83rd birthday I am getting rather out of strength for long camel expeditions, much as I would love it."

I finally received the camel manual a few weeks ago. A nephew of Jasper who lives near Toronto saw him in England late last year and carried it over for me. We met for drinks, and he passed me the book. But he also passed along the sad news that Jasper Evans had died at his ranch in Kenya several weeks before. He was 84 years old.

I'll always treasure those hand-scrawled blue airmail letters he sent me, filled with encouragement. I appreciated them more than he ever knew.

RIP Jasper Evans June 6, 1925 - February 25, 2010

I'm so sorry we never got to raise a glass together in Kenya. 

No one likes a well thought out reading list more than I do. They obsess me, it's true. But they also serve to focus my efforts, reveal themes and dialogues that pass from author to author, and expose me to new writers I might not otherwise have read.

I'm just a few books away from completing the Modern Library's Top 100 Books of the 20th Century--a project I've been chipping away at off and on for 5 years--and it got me thinking about my own area of expertise: travel literature.

I took a couple hours today to browse through my bookshelves and come up with my own Road Wisdom Top 10 Travel Books. Something to keep you busy this summer as you laze on the beach or sneak reading breaks at work.

1) Prospero's Cell - Lawrence Durrell

Born in colonial India in the foothills of the Himalayas but sent to boarding school in England, Lawrence Durrell hated the buttoned-up lifestyle of the north. When his father died he saw an opportunity to escape. Somehow, by some incredible art of persuasion, he convinced his mother to pack up their entire family--four children, of whom he was the eldest--and move them all to the Greek island of Corfu.

They lived a crazy island life with eccentric locals and writers dropping by--people like Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor--and during all those years Durrell plugged away in a little stone house on the side of a mountain and taught himself to write. Prospero's Cell is the story of those years.

When you've finished this, read Reflections on a Marine Venus and Bitter Lemons, Durrell's other island books. And then read everything else he's written. Everything.

2) The Great Railway Bazaar - Paul Theroux

One dark day in the early 1970's, at a loss for what to write next, novelist Paul Theroux boarded a train in London and set out on the longest continuous rail journey he could map. The story of his trip from Britain through Europe to India and Sri Lanka, across Southeast Asia, up Japan, and full circle back to England on the Trans-Siberian Express became an immediate best seller and catapulted the author into the literary big leagues.

That first book was pivotal because it introduced extensive dialogue to a genre that had always tended towards the personal diary, pontification, and self-aggrandizement. Theroux's gift for allowing strange local characters to reveal a place in their own words, coupled with a keen eye for the telling observation, has made him arguably our greatest living travel writer. Start here, and read everything he has written.

3) The Odyssey - Homer

I consider The Odyssey to be the greatest traveler's tale ever told. The origins of the story are fiercely debated by scholars, but it's generally attributed to the blind poet Homer and is a written record (circa 8th century BC) of what was initially oral tradition.

The poem tells the story of the crafty general Odysseus and his journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. According to the book it took him 10 years to get home--though 7 of those years were spent indulging every possible island vice with the nymph Calypso, so he can be forgiven for taking the roundabout route...

It's a gripping tale filled with angry gods, brazen nymphs, Cyclops and shipwrecks, and it's as exciting today as it was when monsters inhabited the edge of every parchment map. Read it immediately--and then flip back to the first page and read it again.

4) The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Worst Journey is a memoir by one of the survivors of Robert Scott's 1910-1913 Antarctic Expedition, and it's probably the greatest piece of adventure literature I've ever read. It's a giant brick of a book, but I never once found it slow. The hardships these men endured are difficult to believe--the author's midwinter expedition to collect eggs from the Emperor penguin's breeding grounds was an epic of survival in itself, with temperatures so low it took the men half an hour each night to work their way in to their frozen sleeping bags, thawing them bit by bit with their failing body heat. The entire story is told in such an underrated way, and so matter of fact. It's a tale of true heroism and an up close look at an age of exploration that's long since vanished.

Upon his return to England 3 years later, with most of his companions dead and Robert Scott frozen to death along with several other members of the South Pole party, Cherry-Garrard took those hard-won eggs he had gathered at such cost on his scarcely believable winter ordeal, and he donated them to the British Museum. They were left in a storeroom drawer unstudied, and not a single person thanked him for bringing them.

The closing pages of the book contain one of my favourite passages in all of travel literature:

"And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man, you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say 'What is the use?' For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys, you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."

 

5) Arabian Sands - Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger was the last Victorian Age explorer, a man born after his time. He came of age during the era of the steam train, and he watched with disgust as the automobile and the airplane changed the world. He felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind, and he deeply resented what he saw as western civilization's unstoppable steamrolling of the diversity and colour of the earth's peoples.

Arabian Sands tells the story of Thesiger's explorations of the Empty Quarter. He crossed this fiercest of sand deserts twice by camel with Beduin tribesmen in what was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

Of traveling in the desert, he wrote, "I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills." Thesiger died in 2003 at the age of 93. His book is a classic of the travel writing genre, and a glimpse into our recently vanished past.

6) Libyan Sands - Ralph Bagnold

Ralph Bagnold began to explore the deserts of Egypt (referred to as the Libyan Desert) while stationed in Cairo in the 1920's and 30's. It was there that he and a small group of friends first took Model 'T' Fords out into the sands--something everyone agreed was impossible given the difficulties of navigating vast dune seas. Over the course of their expeditions they pioneered techniques that are used by desert drivers even today, opening previously unexplored territory and making the first recorded east-west crossing of the Libyan Desert in 1932.

During the Second World War, Bagnold went on to form the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), carrying out small mobile hit and run attacks in the deepest parts of the Sahara, using the skills they'd built on expedition. When the war ended he went into his lab and he wrote The Physics of Blown Sand, which is still the main reference in the field.

But Bagnold wasn't just a pioneer of desert driving techniques and a scientist. Libyan Sands, the book he wrote about his early driving expeditions, is a beautifully observed book filled with eloquent prose; a true classic of desert travel writing. It's not easy to find, but it's worth the effort to track it down. 

7) The Impossible Journey - Michael Asher

Talk about a honeymoon to remember! Immediately following their marriage in London, Michael Asher and his wife Marianetta flew to Mauritania to set out on the first west-east crossing of the Sahara by camel.

It was an unbroken journey of nine months and 4500 miles, and the first recorded crossing of the Sahara from west to east by non-mechanical means. Newswire service Reuters referred to it as "the last great journey man had still to make."

The trip also made for epic travel writing, by a writer who had worked and lived with nomads for years, and who knows a thing or two about camels. Be careful when you crack this one open--you won't be able to put it down.

8) In Patagonia - Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin redefined the genre by weaving his Patagonian travel narrative with small nuggets of historical information and strange local anecdotes in a seamless tapestry of adventure, exploration and lore.

He was a controversial figure, and there were repeated allegations that he fictionalized some of the characters and conversations in his travel books--but Chatwin himself said his portrayals were not intended to be faithful representations. Instead, he sought to capture the essence of that place and that experience. Whether or not you agree with his approach, the sparse style he developed is a work of art worthy of appreciation.

9) In Search of Conrad - Gavin Young

This book was an immediate favorite for me, because I love the novels of Joseph Conrad.

Gavin Young takes to his sailboat and cruises the Malay Archipelago to visit the places Conrad lived in and wrote about: Jakarta, Borneo and the Celebes in Indonesia, and by cargo-ship from Singapore to Bangkok Young also tracked down the remaining traces of the people who became the inspiration for Conrad's protagonists in his novels, and he found that though the surface has changed, Almayer's Folly and Lord Jim live on..

 This is a very cool book for those who love literature, and the story behind the story.

10) Motoring with Mohammed - Eric Hansen

Eric Hansen is better known for Stranger in the Forest, the account of his walks across Borneo with indigenous peoples. But my personal landscape is the desert and, if forced to choose, I prefer his beautifully written book on Yemen.

This is the story of Hansen's quest to rescue 7 years worth of journals, which he buried in the sand on a small island in the Red Sea after a shipwreck left him stranded 10 years before. The book is filled with the sort of characters you only meet on the road: a guide forever on the lookout for one more sheep to squeeze into the back seat of his car, madcap expatriates and Eritrean gun runners. At times surreal and always sensitively observed, Motoring with Mohammed is an incredible journey into a largely forgotten corner of Arabia.

Hansen is a first rate travel writer and you should track down all of his work.

So there you have it. My Road Wisdom Top 10 Travel Books. Don't take this list too seriously--it's subjective after all, and my top 10 will change over time because I never stop reading.

These are just the first great travel books that popped into my head. You'd also do well to read the journals of Sir Richard Francis Burton, and books by Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Robyn Davidson, Lawrence Millman, and Simon Winchester. That'll give you a solid start on some of the greats of the genre.

If you give these books and these writers a chance, they'll open new worlds and expose you to new ideas as you set out on the road to realize your own vagabond dreams.

I hope you'll take a moment to share your own favourite travel books with me in the comments.