Neither Here Nor There

I found Neither Here Nor There (#269), an early travel book by Bill Bryson, at my local library.  The subject of this one is a 1990 trip Bryson took after he'd moved to England to live, trying to recreate his first trip to Europe in 1972 with his friend Steve Katz.  Things are never the same when you try to recapture those youthful memories...

Bryson begins his solo trip in Hammerfest, Norway, the northernmost town in Europe, in order to see the Northern Lights.  Naturally, the best time to see them is in the winter.  Suffice it to say, it's not a place on the top of my list to visit.   After that initial outing, Bryson returns home to England to wait for spring and pleasanter weather to continue his wandering across the rest of the continent - France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and assorted Balkan countries, ending in Istanbul at the edge of Asia.

On reading this, I began by laughing out loud at a number of his situations and observations.  If you've traveled for business or for pleasure it's easy to sympathize with many of his plights.  But as Bryson continues on his journey, especially through Austria and Eastern Europe, I found his wanderings becoming quite melancholic.  Why was he spending so much aimless time in such joyless places?  And why on earth had he and Katz chosen to go there in the first place back in 1972?  It was sobering, looking back at his visit to Sarajevo, that it took place just before the outbreak of vicious Serbo-Croat hostilities when much of the city he saw was destroyed, or that he visited Bulgaria just weeks before its revolution. 

Both my husband and I wondered what Bryson would find if he took roughly the same trip today in the era of the smart phone.  I think he would find the changes even more profound.  You couldn't use this book today as blueprint for things to see and do in Europe the way we used his  In A Sunburned Country before we went to Australia (See my post of 9/5/11.).  Still, it's a bit of nostalgia to look back at his travels, and remember when you were there in the early 70s and again in the 90s.  In many ways, I'm glad you can't go back there again.