Travels with the Flea... : And Other Eccentric Journeys

by Perrin, Jim

• ISBN13: 9781903238363
• ISBN10: 1903238366
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-09-01
• Publisher: Neil Wilson Pub Ltd

Summary

Jim Perrin has long been recognised as the finest of British mountaineering and outdoor writers, with regular, outstanding features in the Daily Telegraph, Climber and TGO. His earlier essays, like the notorious account of a cocaine-and-amphetamine-fuelled solo ascent of Coronation Street in the Cheddar Gorge, are wildly anarchic, attitude-steeped, latter-day classics of the counter-cultural sport of climbing. His 1985 biography of Menlove Edwards (Menlove) won the Boardman-Tasker award and is regarded as one of the great texts in mountain literature. In travels with The Flea, Jim Perrin turns to travel-writing and moves between Kazakhstan and Cuba, Hungary, the Himalaya and the High Arctic. The result is a collection of travel essays that read like Hunter S Thompson meets Robert Byron. Whether travelling by canoe to visit tribes of former headhunters in the Borneo rain forest, riding a Harley Davidson round the Rockies, being propositioned in Portland or walking through Wales with his little dog, The Flea, these are tales of human frailty and resilience, of perception, comedy and joy, framed in precise knowledge and related by one of travel-writing's consummate literary stylists and originals - an eccentric and outrageous adventurer with an ear for the quirky, a sense of reverence, and an eye for the beauty of the world in whatever form it presents. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
Foreword	xiii
Cameron McNeish
Introduction: The Familiar as Strange: The Strange as Familiar	xv
Travels with a Harley	1	(22)
Riding in America before the fall
Small Worlds	23	(14)
Green Gables, Red Earth
Landing Sheep on Caher Island
A Place Apart
Cityscapes	37	(17)
That's the way it is when you're in Seattle
Piece de Resistance
Varanasi in Darkness and Light
Propositioned in Portland
Arctic Fractals	54	(13)
Watching narwhal on the Brodeur Peninsula
The Franklin Graves on Beechey Island
Arctic State of Mind
Changing Places	67	(31)
Cuba: Confronting the Negative
Downtown Hungary
The Valleys
In the Hide of the Lion
`While everybody Knelt to pray / The drifter did escape'
Meetings with Remarkable Creatures	98	(16)
The Wolf and the Goose
Whale-watching Tadoussac
Befriending the Raven
Fellow Travellers	114	(23)
Resident Alien
Drinking with Dervla
Nature's Intimate
Comedian on the Tracks
flibbertigibbet prose-writer
Eastings	137	(19)
Gaspe
The Cow's Mouth
Fragments of Paradise
Travels with The Flea	156	(89)
Through Wales on six legs
Postscript: `An absence bounding at our side...'	245