I was delightfully surprised by this travelogue memoir turned real-life thriller. This is a story about two ivy league grads out to take on the world on a backpacking trip during the Cold War. I went into the story not knowing much more than that and I think that only helped to enhance the experience for me. The author's unflinching honesty about her younger self made the story more relatable for me. After the halfway point I couldn't put it down and finished the rest in one sitting. ( )

I don't usually read memoirs but I am so glad I picked this up. This was very interesting and amazing. I definitely don't have the balls this lady did, so I would have never done this. I was very pleased with the ending as I was worried she wasn't going to do something. What an amazing life experience she has had. ( )

I couldn't sleep last night and finished this book at 3:45 AM!

It's really good. Travel memoir is not necessarily my favorite genre, but the problems that Claire had (which I don't want to give away) made this book more gripping than most. And I really liked Gilman's voice and attitude. Yes, she acted a bit bratty herself sometimes, but she was 21 so I am willing to cut her some slack. Overall, it's a page-turner. ( )

I feel this is a great travel book and I recommend it to anyone that is going to be traveling to a foreign country. This was the story of 2 girls just out of college traveling around the world in 1986. The journey begins in The Peoples Republic of China. The way that this is written made feel very anxious for the girls while they were traveling. While they are in Communist China, they begin to feel paranoid and physically ill. The conditions that Gilman describes were simply unbelievable. But she did such a good job with her writing that I did believe it. 6 weeks into their trip one of the girls goes into a psychotic episode and it is questionable whether or not they were going to be able to get out of the country in order to get her home. Great Book!!!! ( )

I put this title on my to-read list shortly after it was published in 2009, but I didn't actually read it until 2017. With my nascent, anxiety-steeped interest in world travel, it turns out to be a great time for me to have picked this book up.

Unlike some recent, very famous travel memoirs, this one didn't annoy the heck out of me (aside from Gilman's use of the word "tattoo" to mean "a rapid, rhythmic tapping." I don't know why that word irritates me so much, but it always does. And this is the second book I've read this week that used the word in that way. Maybe I should read fewer books). In it, Gilman captures well the hubristic uncertainty (or uncertainty-fueled hubris?) of one's early twenties, but because she presents the story through the lens of two decades of experience, it's more insightful and nuanced than I think it might have been had she written it in her twenties. Or it's more insightful and nuanced than I think I would have written in my twenties if I had been born ten years earlier than I was and with guts enough to travel farther outside of the United States than the Canadian Maritimes.

Possibly my favorite insight from this memoir:

"We were too young and myopic to recognize the perversity of a logic that equates voluntary deprivation with authentic experience...It never seemed to occur to us that only privileged Westerners travel to developing countries in the first place, then use them as laboratories for their own enrichment...Only privileged Westerners sit around drinking beer at prices the natives can't afford while sentimentalizing the nation's lower standard of living and adopting it as a lifestyle." (p. 148)

That kind of self-reflection is what I've found missing from the handful of other travel memoirs I've read (or tried to read). It makes sense to tell one's own story of traveling through a country, including the self-discovery that resulted from that travel, but often the travel memoirs I've read seem to take it a step too far and make the author herself the star of the story, with the countries she visits and the people she meets playing just bit parts in the big story starring The Author, who then goes on to be interviewed ad nauseam and revered as some kind of guru because they had the privilege to take off work for six, ten, or twelve months or more and travel around the world or hike the Appalachian Trail. I'm not knocking doing those things. If you have the means to do so, go for it. It's a heck of a lot more likely to expand your horizons than sitting at home binge-watching Stranger Things, just don't make the mistake of thinking that you are the center of the world you're experiencing.

And no, I don't know who I'm talking to when I say "you." Maybe I'm actually talking to myself because I've recently binge-watched Stranger Things and I've frequently considered both traveling around the world and through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, and if I do either of those things, I'd rather not find that at the end of the journey I've become some self-centered, self-righteous prat.

Based on this memoir, Gilman has managed to travel around the world and have some pretty incredible adventures while retaining---and perhaps even heightening---her sense of wonder and humility at being just one small piece of a huge planet. Luckily, this makes for an interesting memoir, too.

And the fact that she remains an anxious traveler is a relief to me; it gives me more confidence in my own ability to travel despite my trepidations. ( )