Paul Theroux vindicating all travel bloggers, once and for all.
————————————————————-
Perhaps the future of the travel book is the travel blog, with all its elisions, colloquial tropes, and chatty stream of consciousness. It is obvious from the circumnavigation of the Australian Jessica Watson that the great advantage of the travel blog – especially one reporting a feat-in-progress – is the way in which anyone with a computer can be in touch. The highs and lows of such a trip can be experienced and shared by the world in real time. What this trip demonstrated was the exuberance, resilience, and modesty of this sixteen-year-old sailor and her successful voyage.
Jessica Watson (born 1993) is the youngest person to have sailed non-stop, alone, and unassisted around the world. She left Sydney, Australia, on October 18, 2009, on Ella’s Pink Lady, thirty-four-foot sailboat, and arrived back on May 15, 2010. Had her trip taken four more days, she would have turned seventeen.
The 24,000-mile trip was very difficult and eventful – six knockdowns (the mast underwater), towering seas (35-foot waves), 70-knot winds, engine failure, torn sails, and occasionally dampened spirits. But Jessica was never out of touch, posting messages most days, and after each of the blog entries she usually received well over a thousand replies from well-wishers. The followers of her blog grew dramatically as she neared her home port. She posted videos, updates, photos, and news; her website even sold merchandise (caps, posters, etc.) online to fund her trip. In the manner of blogging, her circumnavigation had an interactive element, as she chatted back and forth with the people monitoring her progress.
The tone of her blog is so sunny, it is obvious that such a difficult feat can best be achieved by someone with a positive frame of mind, reminding me that difficult travel is essentially a mental challenge.
Here is Jessica, halfway through her trip, in January 2010: “The picture below is of my very cool new t-shirt which was a present from Mum in my latest food bag. I had to share it with you guys as my crew aren’t doing a very good job of sharing my excitement!” And the accompanying photo shows her wearing a T-shirt with the message “”One Tough Cookie.”
On her arrival home, she was greeted by tens of thousands of people, including the prime minister, who called her a hero. Likable to the last, she disagreed, saying she wasn’t a hero, “just an ordinary girl who had a dream and worked hard at it and proved that anything is possible.”
