Customer Reviews

The Improbable Voyage

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What Tristan Jones lacks in great writing skills he makes up for with great story telling and sheer guts. In 1985, as the Soviet Union was quickly approaching its high water, mark he threw caution to the wind and began a tumultuous journey that would take him through the badlands of the Iron Curtain. Plunging up the freezing Rhine in his ocean going tri-hulled yacht, wintering in Germany, and losing his American crew of two to homesickness and better job opportunities were bad enough for this one legged sailor, but Jones had an objective that he wouldn't put aside lightly. He took on a fresh crew of one, a young German boy, and set off to conquer the Danube and Eastern Europe as the first person to transnavigate Europe in an ocean going tri-hull. The Improbable Voyage is a thought provoking perspective of Central and Eastern Europe at the height of the cold war. It highlights Europe's divisiveness during this time from one of Europe's major arteries, the Danube. It is realism at its best from the heart of a spirited traveler.

Tristan's stories are sometimes a stretch of the imagination to visualize for some modern day river adventurers. Perhaps that is because of his disdain for commercialization of the freedom available from living on the water, but he was certainly a direct person and capable of putting forth his always fair views. This story inspires one to take the same path on the Rhein/Danube voyage which is no longer quite so improbable because of the finished canal between the rivers, and the governments are not so harsh as they were in Tristan's time. This is a refreshing change from the historical/cultural books about central and eastern Europe, which are usually written by literary academics traveling under more probable circumstances, i.e. someone else tends to the details that Jones was forced to handle without large disposable funds.