The site page title and strapline owe their place to the fact they have a place in my ever growing library of books at home. The first is a book waiting to be opened on the first day of travel, for I want to share and compare Norman Lewis’s journey, some 70 years ago, with, and to that, of our own.
‘A Dragon Apparent’ is the title of a book published in 1951, written by Norman Lewis. It is an account of Lewis’s travels through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the twilight of the French colonial regime, before the horrors of the Vietnam war.
an absorbing and heart-aching glimpse of lands, peoples and customs which have gone forever
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I have read the preface to the 1982 edition of A Dragon Apparent and note well Lewis’s comment that ‘inevitably degeneration had followed contact with the West’. But then, I take solace from a further reflection:
There was a right way in Vietnam to do everything, a gentle but persuasive protocol, full of subtle allusions, and nuances in gesture and speech that evaded the foreign barbarian. The Europeans corrupted but failed to barbarise Indo-China, and many of them who lived there long enough were happy enough to go native and cultivate what they could of the patina of the old civilisation.
I wonder where the balance lies in current day Indo-China…
The second book is one I first read many years ago, gripped both by RLS’s narrative style and by the tale itself.
‘Travels without a donkey’ is a nod to the title of a book published in 1879, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. It is an account of Stevenson’s hiking trip in the Cevennes, in South-Central France, with his companion, Modestine the donkey.
Ironically, if pushed, I would say that my favourite tale of a journey actually made by the writer him/herself is As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee. If I have read that once, I have read it 20 times!
That said, I favoured the mystique of A Dragon Apparent, and the quirky twist that is Travels without a Donkey…
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A Dragon Apparent 
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