Skip to main content

The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy

 There are well-travelled people, and then there is Sudha Mahalingam, who is in a league of her own by travelling to 66 countries! Her book ‘The Travel Gods Must be Crazy: Wacky encounters in exotic lands” clearly had to be written because here’s a woman with so many stories and anecdotes to share with the world that they must have come bursting out of her.

The title of the book seems to have been derived from one of my favourite movies from my childhood ‘The Gods must be crazy,” which was a hit in the eighties. And after reading the book, you will be quite convinced that the title is suitable. She is clearly a traveller, not a tourist.

Each chapter in the book describes a different trip that she has undertaken at some point in her life. Each chapter is independent and the book is a collection of these travel tales (not for the faint-hearted, I might add).

She lands up in the Czech Republic without a valid visa and was caught without yellow-fever vaccination in Nairobi airport.

She has trekked to Annapurna Base Camp as a senior citizen and done skydiving at age sixty-six.

She has been to the jungles of Borneo and seen the pandas at Chengdu. She has walked on an artisanal prototype bridge made entirely of single-origin bamboo and ropes over the river Siang in Yingkiong and lived to tell the tale.

There is also a chapter dedicated to how she managed as a vegetarian in places where they ate anything that crawled, moved or had legs!

Her sense of humour and spirit shine through on every page.  She paints a word portrait of everything she sees. Her descriptions of family, friends and people she meets along the way are laced with good humour and make you chuckle.

Interspersed with nuggets of information about each place she has been to, the book is a wonderful travel memoir that I highly recommend.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Book Review of 'Bitch Goddess for Dummies'

Recently, I attended a zoom session on chick lit by the Chennai Lockdown Literary Festival (CLLF). In the session, one of the speakers was Maya Sharma Sriram. I was so impressed with the way she conducted the session and answered the questions that I decided to pick up her chick lit novel, ‘Bitch Goddess for Dummies’ brought out by Rupa Publications in 2012. And I was not disappointed. I’m not sure if I was biased toward the book by the personality I had seen on zoom or not, but I quite enjoy chick lit and have read several chick lit novels in my thirties.   So the novel is about a 27-year-old woman Mira Iyer who decides to transform her personality from good girl to ‘bitch goddess’ to deal with the people in her life. Her mom who is constantly trying to fix her up with some eligible guy so that she can get married and Sanya, the real office bitch who is always cosying up to their bosses and vying for a promotion, are just two of the people in her life causing her angst. So it’s go...
3 comments
Read more

Blogging with a Purpose - Theme Post

I’ve loved books since I was a child. I vaguely recall the 'Ladybird' series of books that I read as a child, but the first novel I remember reading was ‘The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage’ by Enid Blyton that my mom brought home for me to read from the library when I was in Class 4. I then finished the children’s books section in library after library in my neighbourhood. Reading has served me well since I now work as an editor. Reading was what filled my hours as a child and kept loneliness at bay. Reading is what helped me find myself at age 40 when I got back to the habit after several years of reading sporadically. I now average about 25 books a year that I track on Goodreads .  I’ve had the opportunity to interact with quite a few authors online and offline. My cause for the Blogchatter #BloggingWithAPurpose campaign is "promoting authors." There is a popular joke in the publishing industry these days that there are more authors than readers. Authors a...
2 comments
Read more

Book Review of 'Resilience: Stories of Muslim Women'

I read ‘Resilience: Stories of Muslim Women’ by Shubha Menon recently.  The author, who belongs to one of my writing groups, requested a review of the book and also sent me a review copy. The foreword is by Syeda Hameed. Syeda Hameed established the Muslim Women’s Forum in 2001. The author, Shubha Menon, has documented the life of Muslim girls and women of Nizamuddin Basti in Delhi. She discusses the origin of the basti, how it became a magnet for displaced Muslims and goes on to outline “scenes from the medieval ages” in the basti. Sordid realities such as the practice of halala and mutah are discussed, which are used to terrorise women. The author shares the story of Farida, who has five sisters. By the time Farida was sixteen, she was a mother of two and abandoned.  She had been only accorded the status of a domestic servant. Her husband had cruelly divorced her saying “ Log teen bar talaq datein hain, mein tumhein hazaar baar talaq deta hoon.” After a few years, ...
1 comment
Read more