Women Travel: First Hand Accounts from More Than 60 Countries (Rough Guide Specials) Book

Introduction There's a moment that you wait for in putting together a Women Travel anthology: a moment when you find yourself transported by an evocative piece of travel writing and discover, as you add it to the "definite" pile, that a line has been crossed, a critical mass achieved. Like waiting on a bus while yet more passengers squeeze on board, you sense, with a thrill, that the engines will very soon thrum into life and the doors swish shut. A pile of stapled photocopies has become transformed into the first draft of a book. You're on your way. Welcome to Women Travel. This is the fourth anthology that we've put together for the Rough Guides in the last decade and a half, and, as before, we've asked women to send in accounts of their recent travels, sifted through mountains of letters and submissions, leafed through address books, rustled the Rough Guide grapevine, and experienced the same gratified amazement as a book finally began to materialise. Also, as before, we have a clear memory of the batch of articles that swept us across the line. They included Sarah Beattie's description of welding wheelchairs (for landmine victims) in an Afghan workshop under continual threat from the Taliban militia; Rebecca Hardie's comic yet touching account of backpacking around India with her mum in tow (equipped with travel iron and inflatable coat-hangers); Louisa Waugh's drunken revelries and wild gallops across the steppes of Outer Mongolia; Catherine Shorrocks' lucid memories of surviving an earthquake in Indonesia; Dea Birkett's musings on island castaway fantasies in Sweden; Kathleen Jamie's astute portrayal of harassment and friendship in a Pakistan hotel, to name but a few. Without wanting to overstretch an analogy, there were already some inspiring and memorable pieces waiting on board; like Lisa Ball's wonderfully offbeat tales from an Australian rainforest commune (with a naked cyclist crashing through the undergrowth as a wake-up call) or Lesley Reader's trek through the high mountain villages of Bhutan. And others were on their way. Anita Roddick, for instance, wrote to us on her return from Albania where she had been visiting a home for disabled children at the peak of the Kosovar refugee crisis. While Women Travel has undergone quite a few changes in both look and emphasis over the last fifteen years, certain elements have remained the same, and a matter of pride to us. Most importantly we try to cover a broad range of experiences, including as many different voices, perspectives and, of course, destinations as possible. Initially this had a campaigning purpose - travel, well into the mid-1980s, was very rarely presented from the point of view of the woman planning and packing for the journey and we wanted to use our anthology to assert a new female perspective in travel writing. Now, at the turn of the millennium, our task has shifted from pioneering into something more gratifying, and fun: that of showcasing and celebrating women's contemporary travel writing and travel experiences. We've witnessed with great delight over the last five to ten years a minor boom in women's travel writing. Almost every modern travel list contains a good percentage of women writers (rather less than half but with such an astonishing growth rate it seems churlish, or premature, to complain) and we have many other types and forms of travel anthologies that we're proud to share shelf space with. In keeping with this, our anthology now combines extended articles and extracts from our favourite women travel writers and journalists (Sara Wheeler on Antarctica; Isabella Tree on Nepal and Papua New Guinea; Miranda France on Argentina; Lieve Joris on Syria, Melanie McGrath on Las Vegas; Margaret Atwood on the Galapagos islands, to name just some) with over seventy-five entirely new and contemporary travel pieces. We also, for the first time in print, have put together an extended, annotated, women travel bibliography and essential reading list. In fact, one of our main enjoyments in compiling this edition was running our own private, in-house women's travel book festival, immersing ourselves in hundreds of travel books and articles and selecting the best for review. All the titles we've included in our "read on" lists are recommended, the starred ones especially so and, just to emphasise the choices that now abound, we've plucked from the long list of starred titles our top twenty-five contemporary favourites (ten years ago it would have been a struggle to get as far as double figures). Finally, added to this heady mix, and impossible to overlook, are the photos at the beginning of each piece. These are a brand-new feature, which we chose to augment the brief introductions prefacing each of the journeys involved. Leafing through the pages we hope you feel, as we did, that you've joined up with one of the wildest, most inclusive women's tours around. Enjoy the trip and be sure to write.Read More