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Good Reading : August 2005
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12 goodreading Eric Hansen has a fairly low opin- ion of the profession of travel writers; not the literary non- fiction kind, of which he and Bill Bryson are perhaps two of the great- est exponents today, but newspaper and magazine travel writers who, he believes, do little more than act as extensions of the marketing depart- ments of airlines and hotel chains. True travel writers, says Eric Hansen, immerse themselves in other cultures; they get out of the way of the story, and present gripping and illumi- nating accounts of people and places which allow their readers to experience the uniqueness of other civilizations, other life- styles, and of the differences between peoples in a chaotic and frenzied world. Hansen lives and writes what he preaches: ‘I’ve lived in North Africa, and on a kibbutz in Israel, and also in Afghanistan for about a year, both because I found the culture fascinating, and because I wanted to immerse myself in the life and society of the people,’ he said. ‘When I go to a country to research a book, I tend to spend most of my time in remote villages and rural places. It’s there that the fascinating stories are to be found; not so much in the large and cosmopolitan cities, which are all tending towards looking and feeling the same.’ Hansen is the author of Stranger in the Forest, Orchid Fever, Motoring with Mohammed and his latest book, intriguingly entitled The Bird Man and the Lap Dancer .Writing about his experiences has taken him for long periods to places which few in the Western world have ever seen. Here’s how he describes his life between 1971 and 1978, before he even began to think about writing as a profession: ‘I travelled through North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the South Pacific and Australia. It was a different life. I worked in places like Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, as well as in a bakery at the edge of the Sinai Desert, where on Friday nights I stood at the table until dawn braiding thousands of loaves of challah for Shabbat, the holy day. I supported myself by smuggling Chinese erasers from Tibet to North India and Revlon lipstick and false eyelashes to Rangoon (far more excit- ing and profitable than it sounds). One night at a waterfront bar in Tahiti I saw an Italian seaman stabbed to death with a broken beer bottle. A year later I was drinking hot rakshi for breakfast with Tibetan Buddhist monks who lived in a remote monastery surrounded by a rhododendron forest and three glaciers… It was a two-week walk from the nearest road and accessible only by a rickety log footbridge that spans a gorge 75 feet [22.86 m] wide and 900 feet [274.32 m] deep.’ Although he had been travelling around the world for years, it wasn’t until 1982 that it occured to Eric Hansen that he’d collected a vast storehouse of fascinating stories. But how does a young man with no writing experience, begin writing? ‘I’d just spent seven months with hunters and gatherers in Borneo, and I came to Sydney. It was at a dinner party held by the writing life ERIC HANSEN spent 15 years perfecting the art of travel before he became a travel writer. ALAN GOLD spoke to him on his recent visit to Sydney. travel writing the art of
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