Stamp of the Day and Book Review: Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl

I recently reread a most amazing book that I hadn't read for probably 30 years - Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, by Thor Heyerdahl.

It was like seeing an old friend, and realizing that the old friend was even more interesting, nicer and fun than I remembered from before.  The book is a classic of course, and describes the rather crazy trip of 6 explorers on a small balsa raft from Peru to Polynesia and their 101 days at sea.  They proved that pre-historic people could have traveled such distances before modern navigation and metal tools.

Thor Heyerdahl's prose is great, he pulls you into the story and the diary, and there were only a few times I felt 'I want to know more! Give me details!'

Kon-Tiki is both an adventure story and an academic description of fieldwork, a great combination.  The thing I remember most from when I read this book as a teenager was the description of picking up the flying fish that had landed on board during the night, and making fried flying fish for breakfast each day. Somehow that image had etched itself into my memory.

Now I have more images, of whale sharks, crashing onto the reef around the final island, and the monotony of just sea, sky, and a tiny raft...

It is now 55 years since this trip was done, and it has been memorized on many postage stamps. Here are a few from Norway and French Polynesia:

Book reviews: Patagonian travels, one great, one not

 A few months ago I picked up an old Swedish book given to me by a friend, who I have long forgotten, but it was a book I had wanted to read for a long time: Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia.  I think my copy might be the first edition from 1981 in Swedish.  I dug in and started to read, with high expectations, because this was a 'real travel writer'!.  As you might know, I mostly read right before I fall asleep, maybe half an hour a day, at the most.
  Bruce Chatwin leaves work and travels to Patagonia, seemingly unplanned, a place he has always wanted to visit.  His travel diary is not a diary in the regular sense, more broken pieces and fragments of text from his experiences in Patagonia with inserts of history, commentary, and cultural reflections.

And here is the main problem.  Bruce stands outside the whole travel experience.  He reports like a objective journalist, not a person present in the moment.  And he even fails at being objective, because many times you can clearly feel the aversion he has to the people he meets.  It is not a boring book, and the text is excellently written, beautiful in fact, but it is not a good book.  You don't get a feel for the place, and it is too fragmented.

The detachedness of Bruce Chatwin is disturbing.  I can't remember any of the persons he describes in such detail, no stories, no places, no names or characters. No recollection.  There is no focus at all.   How can that be?  It was like nothing as memorable.  I know that this is considered one of the best travel books ever written, but I will have to disagree, strongly.  So I gave up, 10-20 pages from the end.

A few weeks later I needed a book with me when I had to wait for my daughter at the dentists.  I looked in our bookshelf and found "The Old Patagonian Express" by Paul Theroux!  I remember buying this book for my husband, but none of us had read it yet.  I brought it with me, read a few pages at the dentist, and was hooked.  And last night, I finished it.  What a difference.  What joy.  I envy people that haven't read this book, they have such a good read in front of them.

Paul Theroux's book was published a year (1979) after Bruce Chatwin's book and they were friends.  The books are like night and day in difference.  While Bruce Chatwin talks about Patagonia, he never explains how he got there, and his book has not one structured path in it.  Paul Theroux, on the other hand, has a plan, and he loves travel, which for him means to GET TO another place, not BE IN another place.  And I think he is right.  True travel is the transportation phase, the active movement through places, not being dumped in a place and staying there.

The way Paul Theroux traveled to Patagonia is the focus, the structure, of the whole book.  He gets on the subway and then commuter train in Boston in a snowstorm, and then takes local train after local train down to Mexico, through Central America, along the Andes, through long Argentina, and then eventually ends up on The Old Patagonian Express, the narrowgauge steam train that goes to Esquel.  And then the book is over.

This book is not about Patagonia, this book is about human nature, nature and humans. Culture, politics, some natural history, pestering travel companions, good and bad hotel rooms, dusty old railroad cars, giant steaks in dining cars, delays, landslides, revolts, and rats chewing holes in the ceiling above your bed.  It also has great interactions between Paul Theroux and the people he meets, from street urchins in Colombia to impossible Mr Thornberry in Costa Rica and the Argentinians need to be superior while having the right to complain about anything in their own country (and nobody else should).

It is a fantastic story, a meandering travel path through not only North and Latin American geography, but also classic literature (Paul Theroux discusses the books he reads during the trip), and it feels real and human.  He is not trying to be some übermensch, not someone that stands above or besides his co-travelers or people he meets.  He just is.  Now I have to read his other travel books!  Wow, what a read!  Yes, A+ and five stars of course.

There are a lot of great passages in The Old Patagonian Express, and here is one that I think fits this review pretty well:

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

And now, The Old Patagonian Express is mine, forever.  The physical book is still my husband's book, of course. 

What do you think?

Do extraterrestrial aliens exist on Earth?

Do ghosts exist and if so, what are they?

Did human civilizations make the Nazca lines and the Giza pyramid, and if so, how?

Questions inspired by conversations with LA. What do YOU think?

Botanizing in Ecuador's food markets

A few photos from Otavalo's food market. Enjoy the food and plant extravaganza!
Each vendor sells anything and everything. It reminds me of Swedish 'saluhallar' and Reading Terminal Market, just in a more tropical setting.
















Tamarind (brown gue to the left) and papayas and other tropical fruits.












Spiraling bananas. Somehow this photo reminds me of ball bearings.












Beans, and beans...













Picking out the best cherimoya (Annonaceae). The fruit was delicious, and you eat the white stuff that is surrounding the little black seeds.











These are tiny, tiny pink potatoes. Looks delicious!












Pepinos, related to potatoes. In this case you eat the fruit, not the tubers, but the fruit wasn't very good. Maybe you are supposed to cook them.











The largest cabbage heads I have ever seen. At least 75 cm across (2+ feet).












Physalis and small yellow tomatoes.













The produce is just magnificent.













Posole or cooked popcorn. I think this is the same as hominy in New Mexico.












Tree tomatoes, make great juice. They are not real tomatoes, but another genus, and they really grow on trees.











Don't you get hungry?













Great onions for onion soup!

Rain and forest thoughts

Winter is here, it was 19 degrees F this morning (about minus ten Celsius), with 2 inches of powdery snow. Finally! I thought global warming would mean no more snow ever in December, but this year we seems to have some normality again. Well, in December that is, the rest of the year was still climate crazy. Sitting in the cold I was thinking about the rainforest, the humid, green and warm places where you can nearly hear the green things growing. The closest I have been to one this year was at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St Louis. The photo above is from the wall etched with plant silhouettes that is at the entrance to one of the green houses.

Rain as part of a sturgeon-shaped fountain.

And rain inside the greenhouse, where the path takes you under a waterfall. Real rain forests are kind of strange - there is usually 99.9% green and very few colorful flowers. It is not liek greenhouses filled with an abundance of red, pink, yellow, and blue. You really have to look for the color spots in the real rainforests. Also, most flowers are high up in the canopy, not along the trails or planted in pots hung on trees. But the feeling is the same. If you close your eyes and just smell and listen, you can imagine yourself in the Andes or Central America. You only need some birdsounds and howling monkeys and it would be perfect.

Stamp of the Day: Ceviche

More raw food, like the oysters below...
Ceviche is this wonderful South American dish where you take raw fish and shell fish and marinate it in citrus juices and fruits or vegetables, and then eat it - no cooking. The fish has to be fresh of course, and it is wonderful. I had some fantastic shrimp ceviche at the Mexican restaurant La Frontera in Chicago this summer, and we have also made our own here at home once or twice. Some people don't like raw fish, but when you marinate it in the acid juices, it kind of cooks and changes flavor and texture. Just like Swedish gravlax.

This is probably the only stamp in the world with ceviche, and it is from Peru, where this is the national dish of the country.

Stamp of the Day: Kon-tiki

It turns out there has been many stamps with Kon-Tiki, and there is a whole web page with them. Here is only one of them.

When I was a kid I read about the 1947 Kon-Tiki trip in Thor Heyerdahl's fascinating book about their travel from South America to Polynesia to prove that ancient people could move far across the oceans long before the Europeans. They used a balsa wood raft, held together only with ropes and built using old techniques and materials. I loved that book, as well as the one about the boat Ra. One Swede was on the original crew, Bengt Danielsson (see the Swedish flag on the stamp?).

Now Thor Heyerdahl's grandson has done the Kon-Tiki trip all over again, but this time with an ever better raft named Tangaroa (which is the Maori God for the Sea). After Thor Heyerdahl's trip he realized that the ancient rafts had center boards that helped them steer the vessel, a big problem for the crew and which caused the original crew to crash on an atoll in Polynesia. This time his son could happily sail the whole way in a more steerable way.There was a Swede on this trip too, and in their blog you can read about how they celebrated Jun 6, the Swedish National Day:

“ I prepared a couple of boxes of Ravioli with a nice glass of wine for lunch”, Anders tells us. “Tall waves make us save the big celebration for Midsummer’s Eve. "