The Reluctant Traveller

It may be seen as perverse that someone who believes himself to be one of the world's worse travellers should feel compelled to write a book on travel. The task has been undertaken in the knowledge that there are likely to be countless others who share my reluctance to see "The Lonely Planet." For them, and the bolder spirits with the opposite attitude, entertainment may be derived from the candid confessions of a neurotic who is aware that the world will laugh at one who considers a walk to the local crossroads, a day out. Friends, with deliberate irony and a superficial knowledge of the Classics, refer to me as "Homer," knowing of this aversion to Odysseys. This amusing tale follows this "Reluctant Traveller" on a recent West Coast, Canadian and U.S. road trip.

You know the type of book. Some insufferable backpacker leaves behind his perfectly good life in the U.S. for a hot, disease-infested hellhole to eat grub worms, catch giardia and build mud huts with the locals - then has the nerve to claim the experience was enlightening! This is not that type of book. This is travel from a whole new perspective - that of the worst traveler in the world, Dan Fazio. He hasn't written another "Eat, Pray, Love" - it's actually more like "Panic, Sweat, Curse." Fazio's idea of international travel involves relaxing in a Mediterranean villa and stuffing himself with various cured meats. Unfortunately, his wife was drawn to the whole grub worms and giardia thing, and she managed to drag him along on a grueling 10-month death march through Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and Mexico. Shattering romantic travel illusions about swimming in waterfalls or picking olives on a pastoral Tuscan ranch, Fazio reads a bit like Chuck Klosterman if he were being carted around the globe in Bill Bryson's backpack - and reveals that the average traveler spends most of his time puking, being puked on, about to die in a fiery bus crash - or all of the above simultaneously.

The Reluctant Traveler is a true travel story about the trials and tribulations of an average Canadian couple vacationing in Peru, South America. It is written in a day by day diary format. The reader who has traveled to Peru will no doubt relive their journey however in a much different way or possibly not and to the arm chair reader, they will live each day as the author did, trying to enjoy a holiday in a country with few modern conveniences, unbearable heat and huge insects. The Reluctant Traveler is sure to amuse and entertain its readers.

Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613, shows how rhetorical invention, elocution and ethos combined to create plausible representations by generating intellectual and emotional significances which, meaningful in consensual terms, were 'consensually' true. However, some traveller-writers betrayed an unease with such representation, rooted as it was in a metaphorical epistemology out of kilter with an increasingly empiricist age. This book throws new light onto the episteme shift that ushered in modernity with its distrust of metaphor in particular and rhetoric's 'wordish descriptions' in general. In response to the empirical desiderata of scientific rationalism, traveller-writers textually or physically made their own bodies available as evidence of their encounters with wonder, thus transforming themselves into wonderful objects. The irony is that, far from dispensing with rhetoric, they merely put the accent on its more dramatic arts of gesture and action. The body's evidence could still be doctored, but its illusory truths were better able to satisfy the empirical demand for 'ocular proof'. The author's main purposes here are to complement, and sometimes counter, recent work on early modern travel literature by concentrating on its use of rhetoric to communicate meaning; and to suggest how familiarity with the workings of rhetoric and its communicative and epistemological premises may enhance readings of early modern English literature generally.

Sudesh Mishra was born in Suva, Fiji, and took his doctorate from the Flinders University of South Australia in 1989. He received the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for his published verse, including his collection Rahu (1987). He has since published a second volume, Tandava (1992), a passionate indictment of the 1987 coup in Fiji.

After enraging England (writing as Bill Murphy) in Home Truths, Bill Lumley is back in the first of the 'Reluctant Traveller' series. Forced to make good on a drunken promise to travel to Ethiopia to document a journey to the pinnacle of the lost mountain of Wehni, Lumley sets about annoying his mate Gar, his fellow travellers, and a huge number of Ethiopians. As he pursues his quest to avoid all work, any strenuous activity and paying for booze, he plots escape routes back his favourite Bethnal Green watering hole, only to be thwarted at every turn.