Favorite Travel Writers - #5

I am going to devote the next few blog entries talking about my Top 5 travel book writers. There are so many great travel books I couldn’t limit myself to the Top 5 favorite travel books - so I am cheating by talking about my 5 favorite travel book authors. Cheating – maybe – but its my blog so I can do whatever I like. And if you get bored with all this top 10 or top 5 list crap – then you absolutely need to read “High Fidelity” by Nick Hornby. It is a brilliant book. Read it. Now.

Ok I will work backwards – to create a false sense of excitement – for the 2 of you out there reading this.

So we start with #5.

Lawrence Durrell was one of most beautiful and lyrical travel writers ever to put pen to page. He painted such a beautiful picture with words that you want to abandon all responsibility and get on a plane and visit Sicily, Corfu, Crete or Cyprus. You want to sip ouzo with a goatherder, and listen to bouzouki on a back street in the Plaka of Athens. You yearn to see ancient temples, to swim in the warm sea and to smile at toothless Greek grandmothers dressed in black.

I will speak later of Patrick Leigh Fermor who also writes about Greece but Fermor and Durrell do so in such different ways. Durrell is a hopeless romantic frequently referencing Homer, Lord Byron, Sappho, Cavafy and others - creating visions of rosy fingered dawns and wine dark seas.

From “The Greek Islands”:

“The days dawn fine and cool at this time of the year, and the memory of countless Greek dawns over the land and sea are something which every traveler will value and treasure long after he has returned to the mists of the north. Their crisp, dry felicity is almost shameful.”

For Durrell, Greece is a long lost lover that he can write endlessly about and for – who doesn’t want to go to a place like that and fall in love?

Here is a lovely passage about the famous generosity of the Greeks – something which I have been a victim of.



“And even today it is dangerous to express admiration for something, you will certainly find it in your baggage as a farewell gift when you leave. You cannot refuse. They are adamant. I knew a lady who got a baby this way.”

If you are even remotely thinking of going to Greece – pick up “The Greek Islands” or “Reflections on a Marine Venus” and I guarantee that you will soon find yourself underneath an olive tree overlooking the Aegean, reading Homer or Seferis and wondering to yourself “what took me so long to get here?”.