Joel Carillet
Everyone travels. For some, such as the woman in a remote corner of Afghanistan who may never once venture more than five miles from the village in which she was born, the journey is not far. For others, such as the fourteenth-century Muslim from Morocco named Ibn Battuta, who at the age of twenty-one set off on a thirty-year trek and traveled an estimated seventy-five thousand miles, the journey is far indeed.
Wherever you fit along this spectrum, 30 Reasons to Travel is put together with you in mind. The book, based on observations and insights gleaned from the author’s extensive experience abroad, offers concrete reasons for traveling to distant lands. But it does so in a way that also has application for the reader who will stay close to home. Through both words and images – more than 275 photographs accompany the text – the book invites the reader to consider how he or she is part of a journey that the world as a whole is already on. It is a journey that includes things such as strangers and trains, laughter and music. It is a journey in which no one person is the center, and in which there is much to explore.
Joel Carillet is a freelance writer and photographer with a focus on Asia and the Middle East. His work has appeared in a variety of magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including the Christian Science Monitor, Everywhere, Best Travel Writing 2008, and Encounters with the Middle East. "Reflections on the Road,” a biweekly travel column which draws from his experiences in more than sixty countries, can be found at Gather.com.
When not on the road, Joel calls Tennessee home. You can also find him at www.joelcarillet.com.
Rattle and Hum. Most know this as the title of a U2 album. But it can also describe something of the experience of riding a train. In some countries (where they don’t shut train doors), you can hang your body out of a moving car. As wind pours over your face, your eyes sweep the landscape—mountains and valleys, rice fields and corn fields, villages and towns—and all the while you hear the cathartic clank of the train as it carts you to a place you’ve probably never been. The sound, the scenery, the sensation of forward momentum—all are alluring reasons to board a train. The icing on the cake, however, is the people.
It was still early morning when 71-year-old Do Vau Hien, sitting with his wife, snagged me with his eyes as I leisurely surveyed the 100 or so people in my section of the train. He was on the far end of the car and enthusiastically waved me forward, so I left my seat and walked down the aisle to say hello. After a handshake, he offered me a seat across the aisle from him. It was, however, occupied by two shy girls in their late teens, and Hien did not know them. He insisted they make room for a third person, but I said it was no problem at all for me to squat here in the aisle. And so I squatted in the aisle.
Hien, who for the next fifteen minutes would delight me with his excellent English, told me he had been on the train for a while already (I had boarded only twenty minutes earlier in Hue). He had moved to Saigon from Hanoi in 1954, he explained, and liked the U.S. very much. Wishing to offer evidence of his fondness for America, Hien pulled a weathered notebook out of his bag and turned to a page filled with paragraphs of tiny, precise handwriting. It was a speech by Abraham Lincoln, one I had never read before. While I cannot remember the name—by the time I wrote in my journal that night I had forgotten it—I do remember that the speech’s theme was liberty, and that on the opposite page of the English text Hien had translated it into Vietnamese. I asked him why. “It is for my son, who does not speak English well. Lincoln was very wise, and I want my son to understand the meaning of liberty.”
Two hours later, while sitting back in my own seat with the legs of a sleeping 80-year-old man stretched across my lap, I looked up to see Hien standing beside me in the aisle. “The train is about to reach the station in which my wife and I will leave you,” he said. Now clutching my hand tightly, he added, “The world is round, so I think we may meet again.”
