Full title: Swahili for the Broken-Hearted - Cape Town to Cairo by Any Means PossibleI read two of Peter Moore's travelogues last year. The first, Vroom With a View: In search of Italy's dolce vita on a '61 Vespa, I read as preparation for a trip I took to Italy in September of that year, and the second, The Wrong Way Home - London to Sidney the Hard Way, I read as a consequence of enjoying the first. Both were fun reads and I gave both the same 3,5 stars in my reading log, although I seem to recall feeling that there was a little bit too much drinking in The Wrong Way Home for my taste.
In Swahili for the Broken-Hearted, Moore travels overland up the coast of east Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, mainly on public transport and by catching rides. He visits some of the obligatory tourist places on the way, like Victoria Falls and Zanzibar, and stays in accommodations ranging from fairly luxurious lodges to backpacker hostels to cheap flops; meeting a variety of people, both locals and travellers, along the way, and seems to get along with everyone. Having considered doing a similar trip (only with an overland tour company rather than solo) I found his account of the different countries especially interesting.
As with the other two, I enjoyed reading Moore's observations on the places he visited and the people he met, both fellow travellers and locals. He manages to draw a picture of a person or a situation without getting wordy about it, and his view of Africa is open-eyed and unsentimental without ever seeming to be gloating over the miserable social conditions and bad infrastructure he witnesses (i.e. there is no "Africa is so backward" attitude like I have unfortunately come across in some other travel books I have read).
Moore is one of those travel writers who don't seem to feel the need to have some deep purpose^ for their travelling - he isn't trying to find the meaning of life or discover himself - he just likes travelling - and even in this book, which is ostensibly about getting over a breakup, you get the sense that the real reason for the journey isn't so much the breakup as the simple joy of travelling. He doesn't seem to feel the need to analyse how the journey healed his broken heart, he just gets on with it and at the end declares himself to be over the breakup. I like that.
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^Don't get me wrong, other kinds of travelogues can be fun as well, especially the ones with a macguffin (e.g. to find the places that inspired Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan"*, chase down the true origins of Moby Dick**, or to explore and photograph Islamic architecture***, for example), but the more travel books I read, the less fond I become of the find myself/discover the meaning of life/travel as therapy kind. I prefer to read about journeys of discovery and travel for the pure fun and joy of it.
*The Way to Xanadu - Caroline Alexander
**In Search of Moby Dick - Tim Severin
***The Road to Oxiana - Robert Byron
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