Falling Off the Map : Some Lonely Places of The World

by Pico Iyer

Release Date: 26 April, 1994

Edition: Paperback

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Falling off my chair, giggling:)

What can you say about essayist Pico Iyer, whose humor truly shines through in this collection of eight expeditions to places never visited? North Korea. Iceland. Bhutan. Paraguay, to name a few. All of Iyer's anecdotes are interesting, detailed and often down-right funny. Iyer treks to those places you know exist but are likely never to see for yourself; those places in the news but not in the travel plans; those non-vacation spots for the occidental tourist. And he describes all of them in a way both funny and profound. For instance, he says of Reykjavik, Iceland: It "might almost be a small child's toy, as clean and perfect as a ship inside a bottle. ... Reykjavik is one place where it really is worth climbing the steeple of the highest church to see the city, mute and motionless, laid out against the silver sea." Pages later, he says: "In summer when I visited, people were complaining of a heat wave when the temperature hit a chilly 54 degrees." In short, the book is worthy of a gander. It'll make you laugh, think, and want to travel - just not necessarily to the places he describes:)

home is where everything is the same and yet different

Pico Iyer's prose caught my eye in his Time Magazine columns where he did a good job showing us how recognizable the exotic has become. This collection, his first in book form, again reiterates that the most difficult aspect of long distance travel is not any longer how to get there, how to dodge danger or how to find your way back but how to avoid to bump into the same features you left 10,000 miles and 6 timezones earlier. Showing through many examples, sometimes hilarious and sometimes profoundly sad how globalisation regurgitates the same marketing ideas dressed in different flags it really makes its point that the era of the curious gentleman(woman) traveler looking for exotic shores has been overtaken by the vastly less romantic quest to escape the onslaught of canned icons in any neck of the woods.
The book also does a nice job of illuminating the paradoxical quest of the overfed and understimulated prestigious first world traveler trying to find hidden corners where there is still some sort of exploration possible and where not all laws of our structured civilization apply only to be greeted by the not so happy natives who are dying to know how to join the West or in the least purchase its most potent logos.