Between South and North: Travelogue02

Book excerpt: After a not-so-brief absence from South America, I returned and picked-up exactly where I had left off, exactly where I’d begun originally: in smoggy Lima. Only this second time, I angled north: for the equator. The north of Peru is strikingly different from the south and yet again, like once before, I struck-up the most interesting acquaintanceships in a Plaza de Armas. Ecuador came next: there I discovered the whole continent in miniature, but nothing except tourist gimmicks to delay me. I crossed the next border with rare trepidation because the land of coffee, cartels, and cocaine -Colombia- was enjoying such an unsavory reputation. But it proved one of the most extraordinary countries that I've ever set-foot-in. My heart had never felt so heavy as when I took the first step into Venezuela. There I could have lingered longer, visited more places, but a strike paralyzed the cities and it had seemed prudent to leave while I could. Panama: getting in was a lot more exciting than being in. Nicaragua: tiny islands half-lost far-off at sea. Honduras: good roads and donuts. El Salvador: a tragic country whose people have suffered through everything yet refuse to give-in to despair. Guatemala, everybody’s favorite corner of Latin American: Antigua, Chichicastenango and El Mirador. Big Mama on Caye Culker, Belize. Mexico: too many kilometers on too many buses in too few days. Travelogue02 swings through every country south of the Rio Grande, eighteen in all, except the Guianas.    The author is nobody special — he’s just of a new breed of travel writers. And his Travelogues are for a new breed of readers — normal contemporary sorts of people like and my neighbor Tom, feeding their curiosity for curiosity’s sake, taking armchair voyages through countries that until a few years ago were virtually unknown to the outside word. While bookshop shelves tend to sag under the weight of stories about places, not journeys, the latter are far more fascinating. Few books today capture the essence of what it is like to travel. Having established himself with the original bold “what’s it really like Out There” anthology, the author does exactly that. Each Travelogue offers its reader more than the old tired travel diary. Just like each one of the author’s trips turned out most unusual, these books —too— are out of the ordinary. They’re collections of short stories, each capturing a particular moment: some are funny, some emotional, some suspenseful, some downright silly... and each one is very different from every other. They are snapshots of people and places and adventures that had been recorded in words rather than by multicolored pixels of a digital point-and-shoot. What makes them unreal is that all these stories are 100% true... Seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up even if you wanted to. None of it is this normal cut-and-dry stuff. Every story offers a fresh insight, a totally different perspective. On the beaten path... and off of it, against the backdrop of the exotic, anything can happen: and it usually does. More often than not, these stories are set in villages kilometers apart, but there’s never telling what might happen next. The author doesn't care where the journey might take him — it’s all about the experience of being Out There. He’s simply following his passion for discovering and exploring. For Travelogues’ readers, the books are a jaunt into the unknown. It’s the journey and not the destination that matters.