The Travel Addict's Puzzle

By :"Philip Gerald Brown"

Published on 2015-09-13 by CreateSpace

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The Travel Addict's Puzzle (Around (most of) Half the World in Forty Days) The Travel Addict's Puzzle is a humorous book underpinned with a serious look at what drives the author's addiction to travel. His deliberations, whilst travelling alone from Eastern China to Bulgaria on public transport, produce some curious revelations, not all of which are at all flattering to the author. The answers to the puzzle develop as being far more complex and detailed than may have been thought and this is perhaps the only travel book that addresses the intriguing psychology of the travel bug. Notions such as searching for an imagined ideal from childhood, collecting images that become the building blocks of an individual's identity and creating a kaleidoscope of movement in an effort to resist change, are just some of the conclusions that he draws from reflecting upon his experiences. The dissection of the traveller's psyche is illustrated with other adventures, such as how he and his wife managed to reach China overland through South East Asia despite having totally different expectations of the journey, and subsequent travels through China, which are largely of him chasing his wife around the country on crowded hard-sleeper trains, while she travelled in style on planes and bullet trains for her work. He embarks upon a quest to find the rural heart of China, which is challenging as what appears to be a village on a map often turns out to be a city of half a million people, but towards the end of the book he does discover his Chinese Arcadia. From China he crosses the vast deserted steppe of Kazakhstan along the old Silk Road, and through Kalmykia, the only Buddhist republic in Europe and where the capital city has been inspired by a work of fiction. He then skirts around troubled Chechnya and attends a vodka fuelled wedding proposal in North Ossetia, crosses the Caucasus Mountains to enter beautiful Georgia through the back door and finally spans the breadth of Turkey to Bulgaria and the European Union. The book is an honest account of a man who is no longer young but still possesses a drive to explore the world and the people in it. In trying to make sense of it all there is a quiet satisfaction in the knowledge that the more that is understood the deeper the mysteries become.