Brains!

I have picked up a book by travel writer Paul Theroux, whom I assume is supposed to be famous and a celebrated. Troost referenced him a couple of times actually, and that's kind of what made me pick the book out at the book store. This one is called The Happy Isles of Oceania. The cover explains that it is about his adventures paddling around the south pacific by collapsible kayak. I decided, since I've been reading about the South Pacific to stick with the region. However the first chapter is about how much Theroux hates New Zealand, and how depressed he is having just split up with his wife. Way to start a book. I imagine what he is saying about New Zealand is actually quite true, which helps to break down my romantic ideals about the place, much the way my Australian Film Seminar class tore apart my stereotypes of Australia. However I can't help hoping that Theroux isn't just some overly harsh and bluntly opinionated, anti-western civilization, risk seeking, barrier breaking nut job. Either way we'll see how it goes. The book is quite thick. Although there are a few quotes I really like so far amidst the negativity:

"More than an ocean, the Pacific was like a universe, and a chart of it looked like a portrait of the night sky. This enormous ocean was like the whole of heaven, an inversion of earth and air, so that the Pacific seemed like outer space, an immensity of emptiness, dotted with misshapen islands that twinkled like stars, archipelagos like star clusters, and wasn't Polynesia a sort of galaxy?" (18).

Another note I would like to make about travel writers that I've noticed, and bothers me immensely is their lack of placing time frames around their travels. When someone goes to a country and thinks that its better not to mention dates because it makes it too much like a history book or memoir, but rather a place captured in time and never changing is down right stupid in my opinion. As a geographer it annoys me! Places are always changing! If "so and so" goes to "such and such" in the early '90's it's going to be a helluva lot different now then it was back when the world was free of seemingly mandatory cell phone and internet usage to survive. Even on remote polynesian islands, change comes, even slowly, and to not acknowlege that at the time "such and such" was like this, is down right misleading. But maybe I'm just missing the point, and that dates shouldn't really matter in the long run. Hence the reason I'm trying to beef up my travel book shelf so that I may have some good examples if I ever ventured to write an essay about some trip I may take.