There are only a few privileged travel writers who can make anyone reading their features feel the crucial need to visit the places they are talking about. Simon Akam is one of them. He has travelled to Scotland following the trails of a Baedeker one-hundred-year old guidebook and to the Lake District, with Wordsworth’s 200-year-old guide under his arm.
He picked his Baedeker Handbook to Great Britain –a first edition he bought from a New York antiquarian bookseller for $50- and made the move to the north.“It wasn´t easy, a lot of it has changed in this period of time, but I think also to find the things that survive in that context, always is a little bit surprising and they are not necessarily the things you would have expected to survive, I suppose”, admits Simon. Obviously as a travel writer Simon is familiarized with traveling with reference books. “I will often read the guidebook before the trip. So, this is like any trip, but obviously if you follow the old guidebook it would not be the same”, says Akam.
There are many people who chase that surprise factor when they travel and don’t use any travel guide to get the charm of the unexpected discoveries. Funny enough, Simon points out in his Highland’s feature that when the Baedeker guide was first available the New York Times published an unsigned review pointing out that the use of guidebooks while traveling denies the traveler the delight of the unexpected. Simon thinks that “there is some trick to it”, and adds that, “I certainly don´t think the best way to travel is to follow a guidebook and try to kind of take off the content you know… but I think travel guides are very useful things and I also believe in the value of being prepared”.
His resume proves that he means that last sentence and his life seems to be at least as passionate as his travel writing is. After graduating in English Literature at Oxford University he moved to Egypt to study Arabic and freelancing. While there he won a Fulbright Alistair Cooke Memorial Scholarship to study in the United States, where he worked at The New York Times after graduating from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also worked for Reuters in Istambul (Turkey) and at the moment he lives in Berlin where he works for the German newspaper Die Welt.
Getting Wordsworth’s guide to the Lake District was far more complicated, as Simon explains in his article for The Washington Post, because the modern editions in print are of the expanded fifth edition of 1835 and Simon needed the original 1810 text. Finally he found out that the great Bodleian Library at Oxford University had a copy and he managed to get a series of scans.
One can think that a person who has travelled so much has everything but expectations for the new spots he is visiting or living in. “I still do have expectations”, confesses Simon, and he adds that, “I often find myself thinking of comparisons: this landscape looks like that landscape that I’ve seen before. I think that you always look at the new landscapes through the sum of where you have been before”.
Evidently someone who earns his living writing about places must feel passion, not only for travelling, but also for reading about travels. It is need as well a special instinct to find something new and fresh to report about and following the recommendations of centenary travel guides does not seem at first sight the best way to achieve it. However, in his features Akam manages, through his words, to make the reader imaginarily travel to those places and also to travel back on time, describing how things probably were then, even if, as he confesses, “with the Highlands trip I took a more up-to-date guidebook as well, to have a contemporary guidebook that actually I could rely on for the trip”.
Simon doesn’t belong to that huge amount of people who think that if you speak English there is no need to learn any other language (does it sound rude? It’s not my intention :S). He speaks Arab and German and English is his mother tongue. He thinks that while travelling, speaking the language of the country you are visiting “makes things different”. The journalist claims that, “you make a much better impression if you speak their language. English people are normally not very good at languages, compared to other countries we are not very good at all, which is another fact, that at least you are a British person and you can speak their language”. He is absolutely convinced that, “if you like travelling speaking the language makes a great difference to your ability to question the place”.
It is not surprising that he has a globetrotter soul (he has lived in Germany, in the Middle East, in Turkey and in New York City) but when asked about where feels like home, he says, “judging that I am English and I think that defines who I am, I think home is still England, it probably is”. At first he cannot reach a homogeneous conclusion about the most spectacular place he has been to. He mentions “mountains like the Alps or desserts like the Sahara” and he adds that he is also “fond of innovation and architecture”. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that “The Alps and its landscape of spectacular beauty in the heart of Europe” is the most impressive place he has been to.
In one of his features he mentions that travelling “it’s about the journey, as much as the destination”. However, when asked in a broader background for journeys and destinations he affirms that “it depends on what the trip is for and its context, but you cannot really generalize, there are many different types of journeys, there is nothing spectacular about flying, it’s often very day to day, but if you go ski or on horseback, it is not only about the landscape either, it’s about the way you are travelling”.
Hopefully Simon Akam will continue enjoying his enthusiasm for travelling and describing his intrepid journeys and destinations for all those who cannot go to those places but can actually see them through his talented words.
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