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Travels With the Flea: And Other Eccentric Journeys
Travel writer Jim Perrin is a regular contributor to The Great Outdoors, Climber and The Daily Telegraph. This volume collects the best of his recent work and covers venues as far apart as Garhwal and Montana, Kirgizstan and the High Arctic, Hungary and Cuba. It features Perrin spending time with headhunters in Borneo, narwhal in Lancaster Sound, wolves in Yellowstone, walking with his dog through Wales and finding out about the wild tribe of remote Inishturk.
- GenresTravel
313 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2002
About the author
Jim Perrin
38 books10 followers Jim Perrin is an English rock climber and travel writer.
Perrin has lived in Wales since the age of 17. Before turning to writing, he worked in Cwm Pennant as a shepherd. As a writer, he has made regular contributions to a number of newspapers and climbing magazines. As a climber, he has developed new routes, as well as making solo ascents of a number of established routes.
He has won the Boardman Tasker prize twice, first for Menlove (1985), his biography of John Menlove Edwards, and again as a joint winner (alongside Andy Cave's Learning to Breathe) for The Villain (2005), a biography of Don Whillans.
For many years he has contributed mountaineering obituaries for The Guardian (see, for example, the recent contribution on Brede Arkless). He has six children by six different partners, one, Will, also a talented climber, took his own life aged 24.
Perrin has lived in Wales since the age of 17. Before turning to writing, he worked in Cwm Pennant as a shepherd. As a writer, he has made regular contributions to a number of newspapers and climbing magazines. As a climber, he has developed new routes, as well as making solo ascents of a number of established routes.
He has won the Boardman Tasker prize twice, first for Menlove (1985), his biography of John Menlove Edwards, and again as a joint winner (alongside Andy Cave's Learning to Breathe) for The Villain (2005), a biography of Don Whillans.
For many years he has contributed mountaineering obituaries for The Guardian (see, for example, the recent contribution on Brede Arkless). He has six children by six different partners, one, Will, also a talented climber, took his own life aged 24.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 28, 2010
Travel essays of high calibre. The final section details his walk through Wales with "The Flea", his dog. So far I have enjoyed his trip on a Harley Davidson from SF to the Rockies, his hymns to Seattle, Montreal and Quebec and his visit to the High Arctic Circle Nunavut territory of the Inuit homeland.
His references suggest a meditative reader, one of those reader-writers who can excel with language paradoxically because they distrust the screen it places between the conceptualised ego and the numen. His vision is steady, sometimes vituperative in his contempt for the shoddy and cheap that softens an (implied) vital humanbeingness into jelly. He's not prevaricative when it comes to dislikes: he calls Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "unpleasnt" and "near unreadable", for instance. Shame that one!
Quirky, perky, precise imagery, a sense of connection with the humans he meets (I would say it is something that comes from Love), and not too heavy on the meditative slop of solipsistic pumpery that befouls so much 'travel writing'. He is sharp, his vision clean.
His references suggest a meditative reader, one of those reader-writers who can excel with language paradoxically because they distrust the screen it places between the conceptualised ego and the numen. His vision is steady, sometimes vituperative in his contempt for the shoddy and cheap that softens an (implied) vital humanbeingness into jelly. He's not prevaricative when it comes to dislikes: he calls Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance "unpleasnt" and "near unreadable", for instance. Shame that one!
Quirky, perky, precise imagery, a sense of connection with the humans he meets (I would say it is something that comes from Love), and not too heavy on the meditative slop of solipsistic pumpery that befouls so much 'travel writing'. He is sharp, his vision clean.
October 27, 2014
I first became aware of Jim Perrin back in the 1990's, when his column was the first thing I'd turn to in every issue of Climber. He displayed in those scribblings a rare gift not only for evoking landscapes and places and the people that interacted with them but also for seeing the big in the small. A single move on a rock-face could explode outwards and backwards, conjuring other climbs he'd made in the same area with other people, summoning the ghosts of events of the past in that place and its surroundings - not just his own but of other historic or even folkloric events.
I did not know at that time that he also worked as a travel correspondent for The Telegraph and it is from that publication that I think most of these essays are gleaned. The result is very much a book of two halves, beginning with foreign travel - especially in the USA. Although Perrin's talent with words is still apparent here I felt that the canvas was too large. His enthusiasm was palpable but the writing was almost the reverse of what I just describe. As a tourist (I'm sure he'd hate to be described thus) he necessarily works from the big to the small, trying to find the interesting details in an overwhelming starburst of new experiences.
The second half of the book is largely taken up with one narrative, however, what the author winkingly describes, with a nod to his climbing routes, as a 'traverse' of Wales. Here his full skills shine through as we walk not just through a place but through history, personal and national, folklore and environment. He's misanthropic, occasionally irascible but always in love with a place that he wants to share with the world. To show us all why it's so special. He largely succeeds in this, even if he occasionally allows his moochin, socialist, politics to dominate a page where perhaps a lighter aside would have been more appropriate.
Overall then, two stars for the first half and four stars for the second averages out as a book I 'liked', rather than 'really liked' as GoodReads would have it.
I did not know at that time that he also worked as a travel correspondent for The Telegraph and it is from that publication that I think most of these essays are gleaned. The result is very much a book of two halves, beginning with foreign travel - especially in the USA. Although Perrin's talent with words is still apparent here I felt that the canvas was too large. His enthusiasm was palpable but the writing was almost the reverse of what I just describe. As a tourist (I'm sure he'd hate to be described thus) he necessarily works from the big to the small, trying to find the interesting details in an overwhelming starburst of new experiences.
The second half of the book is largely taken up with one narrative, however, what the author winkingly describes, with a nod to his climbing routes, as a 'traverse' of Wales. Here his full skills shine through as we walk not just through a place but through history, personal and national, folklore and environment. He's misanthropic, occasionally irascible but always in love with a place that he wants to share with the world. To show us all why it's so special. He largely succeeds in this, even if he occasionally allows his moochin, socialist, politics to dominate a page where perhaps a lighter aside would have been more appropriate.
Overall then, two stars for the first half and four stars for the second averages out as a book I 'liked', rather than 'really liked' as GoodReads would have it.
March 10, 2021
Excellent series of short stories, especially the foreign one’s.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews