114 Days Through 38 Cities in 15 Countries
I picked this book up in an airport bookshop pre-pandemic and started reading it on the long flight home from South Korea. When I walked in my front door, I tossed it and everything else aside for a few weeks while I dived back into work. A few weeks ago, I dabbled at it again and tried to get back into it but it was a like reading someone’s 114-day journal – which it is. But I recently picked it back up and found that James’ directness and simplicity lent the book a comfortable universality perfect for the bedtime mind. It is not the kind of book you must stop and think about. It is more like listening to an interesting person chat about his trip.
Kyle James and his partner Ashley or “Ash” quit their boring jobs in Denver and took a four-month journey through Europe and Thailand. That is not so rare these days and many people who do, keep a journal or online blog about their journey. Few of these accounts are published in book form, unfortunately. This book is in a day-by-day journal format and is a peek into the lives who two millennials experiencing long-term foreign travel for the first time. This is an experiential narrative that is well-written and will be useful for readers ready to set out on their own travel adventure.
Kyle and Ash Airbnb and BlablaCar their way across western Europe for most of the book and add enough detail to give the traveler some useful tips on cheap travel across Europe. Although I have traveled in Europe extensively, I learned enough to make the read worthwhile. Kyle’s chatty story-telling abilities and willingness to share the downs as well as the good times made the lessons very entertaining. Now next time I make it to Budapest I know to check out the ruin pubs.
Kyle has an appreciation for history and is well-read on World War 2 and the Holocaust. The couple’s visits to Auschwitz and the Holocaust Museum in Berlin are rendered with feeling. The author described a feeling of “wearing a heavy blanket of cold, damp hatred” as he stood in a room where 1.1 million people were murdered.
But most of the journey is told with a sense of humor that had me laughing. James’ descriptions of the bus for “people that made a really horrible decision in life” and a ferry in Thailand that had everyone on it tossing their cookies are memorable. As is their capacity for food and alcohol.
In Thailand they spend weeks on islands as well as on an elephant preserve north of Chiangmai where they have a spiritual encounter that makes quite an impact. I would love to read a sequel of more travel in Asia from this author.
I wish publishers would give us more travel books like Not Afraid of the Fall. Inkshares, an innovative, pre-order-based publisher in Oakland, published Not Afraid of the Fall in 2017. Unfortunately for lovers of travel essays, this seems to be the only travel book in their fiction-heavy catalog. The quality of the paperback and the editing were excellent, and I was pleased to see that it was printed in the United States.
You can follow Kyle on Instagram @kylerobertjames
