Departures & Arrivals [Hardcover]

Eric Newby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

From an open boat ride down the Ganges to long-distance cycling through Europe, these essays span 50 years of Newby's travels.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Eric Newby got the travel bug from his parents, who would leave him with a housekeeper for months at a time when they went off to market their fashion "productions." But he took the habit farther afield and for far longer than anyone could have imagined, and in the process developed an audience devoted to his witty travel tales. Now in his 80s, the venerable English travel writer still pedals a cycle or bounces across a desert on a jeep whenever the opportunity presents itself, for, as he notes, it might well not recur. In this selection of short pieces, Newby focuses on his most enduring memories of departures and arrivals, beginning with his regular walks "up to the bend and back" with his mother in his childhood village of Barnes, England. With abundant detail and his trademark self-deprecating humor, he takes his readers on one of the last journeys of the Orient Express, into the world's biggest opal field in South Australia (where miners live in the "unimaginable horror of corrugated iron huts" in 140° temperatures), and on to Tuscany for the mad two-minute horse race known as the Palio where horses and riders are regularly maimed or killed. In his 70th year alone, Newby cycled from Rotterdam to Dijon, traveled to northern Rajasthan for the full moon of Kartik, when tens of thousands of Hindus try to bathe in the sacred lake at the same time, and then to the biggest cattle fair in all of Asia, where he describes in delightful detail the twice-daily bathing of the elephants. Two years later he decided to ride his bike along the meridian two degrees west of Greenwich in bleak November weather because it was the only time of year he could stay at bed & breakfasts without advance reservations.

The short essays cover lots of territory at a rapid pace and, as a result, are not as satisfying as his classics, such as A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines. But he makes up for the lack of length and depth with a brilliant selection of telling scenes and the amused irony with which he views the world and himself. During a visit to China, he irreverently describes the embalmed Chairman Mao this way: "Lying there, with only his face visible, he looked like an over-sized omelet from the McDonald's across the way at the south-west corner of Tiananmen Square." As for himself, he's busy being overtaken on his made-to-order touring bicycle by elderly Dutch ladies "mounted on bikes that looked like two harps welded together." With his ironic and endearing sense of humor and his willingness to go absolutely anywhere, Newby makes the perfect traveling companion. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

"Nothing... left such an indelible imprint on our minds as the moment when we discovered that the Ganges was only 40 centimetres deep and that our boat drew 46 centimetres," says Eric Newby (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), intrepid world traveler, in Departures & Arrivals. From the Palio in Siena, to China's Forbidden City, to Berwick-on-Tweed, Scotland, by bicycle, to crossing Syria by train, to landscaping his own back yard, Newby reaches back over the last 50-odd years in these recollections that combine old-school travelogue with self-deprecating humor. With wife and travel companion, Wanda, at his side, Newby dispenses insight into the human fascination with foreign adventure. Photos.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 228 pages
• Publisher: Lyons Press; 1st edition (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585742244
• ISBN-13: 978-1585742240
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,401,943 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars And the bits between.., August 29, 2011

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John the Reader "John" (Orlando, FL) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Departures & Arrivals (Hardcover)

This book is actually more about the bits in between an arrival and departure, and it is, as I have come to expect from this author, a very pleasant book that will no doubt give equal pleasure at a later rereading.

Travels from earliest memories...up to the bend and back of his home street in darkest Barnes in SW13... to even more foolhardy forays in Yemen, China and Russia, often by bicycle, raft and early `developing country' transport Eric, and his ever present companion Wanda, revel in his big, wide, wonderful world. Unlike the elderly lady he takes to see the view atop of her local mount, overlooking the Po Valley - which she had never before left - who exclaims;"Come'' grande il mondo!" and then insists on being taken straight home, Eric glories in his travel, arrivals and departures.

Extraordinary things always happen to Eric on his journeys, or, if they fail to materialize despite his prodding curiosity, there is always the fascination of history, or people to describe in rolling prose. All the narratives of the author please, and he added immeasurably to the genre of travel books with wisdom and sneaky, chuckling wit.

Or his wife Wanda tells him off and puts them firmly back on their crooked, always chaotic, and enjoyable paths!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent armchair read, October 13, 2001

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Departures & Arrivals (Hardcover)

In Departures And Arrivals, British writer Newby and world traveller Eric newby describes his latest travel adventures with a gift for irony and description: here his experiences in Calabria, with canal travels, and in Beijing capture the vivid peoples and personalities he encounters. An excellent armchair read.