Laughing at travel misfortunes

Safar, we Indians like to think, is ‘suffer’. Maybe you are the kind of traveller whose journeys are restricted to the armchair—in which case the only thing gracing the seat of your pants is a fat cushion. Then you will smirk and chortle at the frothy—and occasionally hilarious–tales recounted in By the Seat of my Pants: Humorous Tales of Travel & Misadventure (Lonely Planet; Rs 550). But maybe you are an accidental-prone person this kind of stuff happens to on a routine basis. And perhaps you’re reading this book in the rough and tumble of an especially disastrous trip. Can you laugh at yourself? Dark humour underlines these largely self-inflicted situations. Bill Fink attempts to climb Mt Fuji at midnight, Pico Iyer takes a white-knuckle, four-wheel whirl through Ethiopia, Doug Lansky gets stuck in a Dutch toilet, Jan Morris’ first trip on a vaporetto in Venice may well be his/her last, Rolf Potts sees the dubious light of enlightenment in the high Himalaya…Don’t let all this put you off, though; the underlying message of the book is unambiguous enough: the rewards of travel are substantial; travel lets you improvise, and that’s fun; travel is great…If anything you’ll close this book on a high, emboldened in your foolery. This is regulation airport reading.