TRAVEL: Subversive Non-Fiction Travel Books on Asia

Thomas Kohnstamm celebrates nine books that have really rocked the boat in his latest article on World Hum.  Several of these are focused on Asia:

‘Across Asia on the Cheap’ by Tony Wheeler and Maureen Wheeler

Asia’s overland Hippie Trail was already a well-worn counterculture experience by the time recent business school grad Tony Wheeler and his wife Maureen published Across Asia on the Cheap in 1973. However, the guidebook broke ground by mainstreaming the globalized backpacker counterculture at the polarized height of the Cold War. Moreover, it brought a DIY aesthetic and strong opinions to the travel guidebook genre. The lasting effect was that the book (and its subsequent series) constituted an easy entrée to alternative, independent travel that could be devoured by the masses.

[This book is now out of print with limited availability.]

‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ by Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa

OK, so maybe Marco Polo didn’t actually become the right-hand-man of Kublai Khan. Maybe he never met Kublai Khan at all. And, yes, the most famous Venetian of all time didn’t write the book—that was left to a ghostwriter and cellmate, Rustichello da Pisa, who probably interjected additional fictional elements (after all, da Pisa was a romance writer who had already knocked out a King Arthur book). Fact checking was piss poor in the 13th Century, so we’ll never really know the truth. All of that aside, few books inspired so many Europeans to seek fortune and adventure outside of Europe and, thereby, alter the world. One person known to have been heavily influenced by The Travels of Marco Polo was a Genoese guy named Columbus.

[Kindle Version Available for Free Here]

‘Nobody Said Not to Go—The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn’ by Ken Cuthbertson

Unaccompanied female travelers were still a rarity in America by the 1920s—and so Emily Hahn dressed as a boy on a cross-country car trip. By 1948, Hahn had moved to the Belgian Congo, crossed Central Africa on foot, entered into a turbulent affair with a Chinese poet in Shanghai, and had two children with Britain’s chief spy in Hong Kong. Top that in 2010, Bear Grylls. This biography is an engaging introduction to a complicated and strikingly progressive woman. Follow it up with some of Hahn’s own work: 52 books and more than 180 New Yorker articles.