Jan. 05--"No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late"
Seal Press, $17
Author Ayun Halliday sets the scene in the new foreword to the second edition of "No Touch Monkey." Halliday traveled the globe in an era that can rightly be called "BTI": Before the Internet. That meant no email or social media. No Facetime, travel blogs, couch surfing, or Internet cafes. Calling ahead was useless, too, "when you consider," she reminds us, "pre-millennial, pre-cellphone international rates." What was a low-budget international traveler to do? The answer lies within the pages of this hilarious travel classic, which she describes as "what it was like to be young, foolish, curious, unfettered, stupid, hungry, untethered, amazed -- and offline."
A greenhorn traveler at the age of 22 when she first set off, and with a theater degree under her belt from Northwestern University, Halliday begins her tale in the men's room of a Munich train station. You just know things will -- and do -- go downhill from there. It involves her then-boyfriend, shampoo and a strict by-the-book female bathroom attendant ("They have a woman working in the men's room?") screaming "Ist verboten!" and who knows a thing or two about using a broom.
Halliday is the ultimate drama queen, and yet nothing seems to faze her. Indeed, she collects dreadful after dreadful experience like a badge of honor while maintaining a chipper attitude. Yet, invariably, if bad things are going to happen, Halliday is there to witness it and, most importantly, write about it. A humorless woman with a West Indian accent appears out of nowhere in Amsterdam's red light district ("Where had she come from?") and demands our heroine hand over her friend's borrowed Pentax camera after she inadvertently photographs some prostitutes. On her first night in Tanzania she is bitten by a "special" mosquito. "Malaria," she is told later.
Other memories include dislocating her knee in Sumatra and then dragging herself to a latrine "in a semi-crawl, a la Andy Wyeth's 'Christina's World.'" Another time she is robbed of her belongings while lying on a beach in Bali. She runs after and catches up with the thief and then starts "bleating like an air horn at a football game," which prompts him to throw a "glancing blow" to her forehead. But humans aren't the only thieves. In Pushkar, India, she and her boyfriend confront a giant monkey who makes off with his shoes.
She ends her travel tales on a surprisingly -- but well-earned -- mild note in the Scottish port town of Rothesay on the Isle of Bute. Nothing particularly bad happens here aside from her "puny urban umbrella" being no match for the horizontal rain, as she happily fortifies herself and her baby daughter against the elements by watching reruns of "NYPD Blue" in a cozy B, with nary a monkey in sight.
"Lonely Planet's Wild World"
Lonely Planet, $39.99
"Every picture tells a story," sang Rod Stewart in his classic 1970s song of the same name. That is certainly the case here. Devoid of text altogether -- except for a few paragraphs at the beginning -- this oversized volume from Lonely Planet allows the images of Earth's wild terrain and creatures to speak for themselves, from Africa to North America and with stops in Europe, Asia, Australasia, Antarctica and South America. While the natural wonders shine -- icebergs, deserts, mountains -- what really stands out are the personalities of the earth's wildlife: The white coat of an Arctic hare blends into the whiteness of a winter wonderland in Greenland; shaggy Icelandic horses find shelter under the barest of trees; kangaroos bounce along a sandy beach in Western Australia; a yellow-breasted, long-billed toucan in Cartagena, Colombia, playfully stares at the camera; a male cougar in Belize seems ready to pounce at a moment's notice.
Despite all the changes that humans have wrought on the planet, "our home," write the book's editors, "still has the power to evoke awe" and "respect ... to comfort and thrill us. ... Billions of years after it was forged, it's still a wild world."
June Sawyers is a freelance reporter.
