LAURENCE MACKINreviews
Going as Far as I Canby Duncan Fallowell and Lonely Planet's guide to
Tahiti & French Polynesia
Going as Far as I Can
Duncan Fallowell
Profile Books, £8.99
Left a decent sum of money by a close friend, Duncan Fallowell decides to use it to go as far as he can from his home, in London. This means a trip to New Zealand, a place that seems to have an odd postcolonial familiarity – and a total otherworldliness that persistently seems to ambush him. The clarity of the light and the intensity of the country’s colours are what initially strike Fallowell almost speechless, and he embarks on a mission of sorts to trace fragments of history whose resonance lingers: an Old Vic touring production, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at a time when they were at their most tempestuous; a decent rosé (more complicated than it sounds); and Karl Popper, who fled to the country from Nazi Vienna in 1937, ditched his native language and wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies in English. Fallowell seems to have grave misgivings about travel writing and, it sometimes seems, about travelling itself, but this is a book written with the benefit of the clarity of Antipodean light, and is refreshing in its coherence and precision.
Tahiti & French Polynesia
Lonely Planet, £15.99
If New Zealand isn’t quite far enough away, might we suggest Tahiti and French Polynesia? This guide seems a tad brief, but we are dealing with a tiny handful of islands (4,000sq km to be precise), and it manages to pack a lot in. If the prose doesn’t convince you, the pictures will. Whether lazing on the beach is your priority, or exploring ancient ruins, there’s plenty here to give you ideas. There’s a particularly decent section on diving in the area’s crystalline waters.