We know a pre-Christmas book when we see one and Trek! by
award-winning Swedish nature photographer Claes Grundsten is
definitely destined to find its way under the odd indoor pine
tree.
The
book, as you may guess from the sub-title - 'the best trekking in the
world' - is a lavishly illustrated tour of the 40 trekking routes
that Grundsten rates as 'the best'. Of course you can always question
why the Everest Base Camp trek is worthy of inclusion, while the
Annapurna Sanctuary isn't and wonder why the entire Karakorum's been
left out, but there's no real point and no right answers either.
It's better to look at stuff like this as a directory of dreams,
something to spark ideas, remind you of places you've already been to
and inspire you to visit others you may never have heard of. So it's
nice that alongside Everest, the Inca Trail, Kili, Mont Blanc and the
Torres del Paine, there are less obvious areas like the Pirin
Mountains of Bulgaria, Kebnekaise - Sweden's highest peak - and
Roraima in Venezuela, a colossal table mountain rising from the
grassland and cloud forests.
Pictures...
You can generally assume with glossy, weighty, coffee table tomes like this that
the photography will be technically excellent and nicely reproduced but also slightly
predictable with beautiful sweeping landscapes interspersed with
character shots of locals that always seem to look a tad posed and
synthetic and so it is with this one.
I guess if you're producing a big, glossy hardback then ripping
open the belly of social deprivation and spillng its guts across the
page isn't really on the agenda, but it makes for a bland experience.
Travel without the noise and smells.
... and words.
Similarly, you know that books like this exist for the visuals and
anything remotely readable on the facing pages is a small bonus.
Grundsten may be a literary genius in his native Swedish, but in
translation, it's all bit plodding, lightweight and whimsical; the
man makes Michael Palin seem like Hemmingway.
Reading about Peru's Cordillera Blanca where I spent six weeks
climbing a few years back gave me no feel of what it was really like;
the smells, the crispness, the thin air and the friendly but slightly
distant local people are conspicuous by their absence.
Similarly, what makes the Everest trek so astonishing, if you
start from Jiri in particular, is the way the landscape shape-shifts
and changes as you crawl inexorably upwards towards the desolation
that lies under Everest itself. And that, together with your fellow
trekkers, is what it's all about. And, I suppose what trekking is
about.
Strangely, for a book called Trek!, there's largely an absence of
the sense of travelling or journey. Nice pictures to look at then,
but don't expect too much more.
Trek! is published this month by Duncan Baird Publishers and will
cost £25. More details at www.dbponline.co.uk
