eBook Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma ePub

A travel book is never merely a collection of places and names. If it were, it would be sold on a different shelf with the guide books. A travel book is a part of that wonderful tradition we call the personal essay, or, as it has come to be called on college campuses these days, Literary Nonfiction.

In a travel book we learn more about the author than about the places he visits. Mistakes the author may make in transliterating the local language, or in describing the "meaning" of what he sees, may be forgiven as long as he sheds some light on the more important journey that each of us makes across the landscape of the human condition.

Jules Verne wrote wonderful travel books about the moon and the world under the sea when ill health kept him confined to Paris for his whole life. Peter Mayle collected some French bread recipes into a book called "A Year in Provence" and it became the best-selling travel book of all time.

And in "Borderlines" British author Charles Nicholl has turned a failed three-month quest to visit a jungle monastery in northern Thailand into a fantastic, and I do mean that word in its literal sense, record of the changes he went through on his meandering journey toward the temple.

Almost immediately upon leaving Bangkok, Nicholl falls in with thieves and con men, and of course with the obligatory Asian femme-fatale.

Like Alice following her white rabbit (the woman's name is Kratai) Nicholl is pulled through a land of shifting shapes and loyalties, of shady characters and conflicting hungers, and various substances labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me."

The author witnessed everything with a novelists' eye, but he reports the events of his trip to us with a journalist's vocabulary and the passion of a poet.

What he has to say about the place of the farang in Thailand, the nature of good and evil, the part economics plays in politics, and the way travel changes the traveler will enlighten the most neophyte tourist and the most jaded expatriate.

While Nicholl never made it to his temple or to the Buddhist master he wished to learn from, his travels with fallen women and mad criminals taught him everything one could expect to learn in three months' time.

The reader with an open mind, and with even a hobbyist's understanding of Buddhism, will appreciate that the lessons Nicholl took back to England with him were well in keeping with the sutras. One imagines the reverend monk whom Nicholl never met some day reading "Borderlines" and approving of it wholeheartedly.

In his introduction Nicholl writes: "This is not a book `about' Thailand, and certainly not a book about Buddhism. I am not qualified to write those. My only qualification is that I was there, and this is what I made of it all."

That qualification was all Boswell, Solzhenitzen and St. Matthew could claim. Students of Thailand should be grateful to the powers that be that Charles Nicholl had as much.

A lyrical, vivid, picaresque account of one adventurous man's oddyssey through Thailand and Burma. Nicholl is able to evoke the beauty and mystery of South East Asia without succumbing to the usual, "exotic" cliches and mushy prosody. His is a rational, discerning eye dazzled by the grandeur of an alien land.
Almost every detail of his account is fascinating, every character vital, astonishing, yet believable. Reading it was a huge inspiration in the days before I made my own, reckless trek through Asia. One of the most down-to-earth, poetic and enthralling travel books ever.
Please, Amazon, urge the reprinting of this book, or find an alternate source so that others can enjoy it as I did.

I was in Sidney enroute to Bangkok maddly looking for SOMETHING to orient me when I landed, when I stumbled across this gem. It was the cover that attracted me at first - crimson red earth, lush green foliage, searing blue sky, white clouds. Beautiful - but at odds with the title - Borderlines, which seemed to imply a vaguely psychotic, marginal subsistance kind of place that didn't square with what I was expecting from the beach holiday image I had been assured of.
What was "Borderline" about Thailand?
As I found out - everything.
A remarkably insightful "traveler's classic" which explores the country, its people and ones state of mind as you travel through it being seduced. Prose that remind one of a cross between Somerset Maugham in "The Comedians" and gonzo journalist R.H.Thompson. Where did he learn to write!
Then a couple of years ago I was mentioning this trip to a buddy who teaches Elizabethian Drama - he knew Charles Nicholl for his remarkable sleuthing done in "The Reckoning" which showed some hitherto undiscovered facts that support his contention that Christopher Marlowe may have been eliminated for his spying activity rather than in a chance brawl in an obscure tavern on the outskirts of London in 1594.
This is a talented man.

I't more like a travel log or journal from the author, but it gives you a great perspective of what Thailand's life is like, since he goes beyond the regular tourist polaces and wanders into the country looking for a monastery but stumbles into different adventures without being this his primary purpose.

Nicholl's story is at turns entertaining and informative, and he tells it well. (This reads more like fiction than a travelogue.) It's a light, quick read. My only criticism is sometimes it feels Nicholl is trying a little to hard to be a novelist rather than a travel writer when he circles back to the title, which feels contrived.
But that doesn't detract from the story, and paired with Lily Tuck's "Siam", and a couple "Rough Guides", you'll be itching to buy your ticket to Chiang Mai.