Female travellers and their books have charmed me for many years. I have read about the great explorers and mapmakers since I was a small girl, but it was Frances Mayes and her Tuscany books which really hit a nerve in me. The way she writes about and shares her love for travels, for being on the road, for litterature and poetry, for the people she meets, for landscapes, art, sun, olives.......I have all her travel books here at the cabin (we are enjoying our winterbreak in the snow, cabinlife), and read then over and over again.
It must have been after "meeting" Frances that I started to search for books written by other female travellers. First Carol Drinkwater, then older books by Alexandra David-Neel, Dervla Murphy, Margaret Fountaine, Marianne North, Jan Morris, Isabella Bird, and my "newest find", Freya Stark.
It is easy today to send impressions home. When I was in India I wrote long travel tales several times a week, both in Norwegian and English, emailed them to friends and family, and I updated my blog with photos and words daily. I sent loads of postcards, knowing that people would get them in a week or two, and since I had long, lovely evenings in Carolyn and Hossy's home,I had time to write letters. handwritten on Indian handmade paper.
The early traveller depended on their handwritten letters. Dervla wrote page up and page down and sent them home to a friend. Later the letters were what she used when she wrote her travel books. Isabella Bird sent letters home to her sister, and some of her books are a collection of these. I love the way she takes us through Japan only through letters. Margaret Fountaine probably sent letters as well, but she also kept a diary on the go, and once a year she gathered her notes and wrote down her previous year in her main diary. Her life all she was a teenager, can be found on these pages, and today I can open my book and travel with Margaret, collecting butterflies with her around the globe.
Freya mastered the art of travel letters. During her life, she reached the age of 100, she wrote 30 books on her adventures, including four volumes of autobiography and eight of published letters.
What a blessing for us today that the early travellers developed the art of writing travel letters. Their travels often meant spending days, weeks, even months on the road, on a ship, on a camel, bicycling. Life was slower and they found the time their needed for writing. And they used it. I want to learn from these women. I want to be adventurous like them, I want to spend time reflecting and sharing life like they did.
I have found that one can nearly always do what one sets out for, if it is only one thing at a time. Freya Stark
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Don't forget to leav a comment for the sock giveaway.
