Gertrude Bell on her trip to Saudi Arabia
The writer Martin Casariego recounts with his renowned sharpness the adventures of fifty travelers who left their mark over the centuries. An indelible and indestructible mark on the soils of the five continents, with the peculiarity of doing it, as Casariego says, "with the soles in the wind", that is, practically without setting foot: they do not stop traveling and moving from one point to another of the ends of the earth and, in most cases, thinking of other destinations, dreaming of the next one.
Such are the authentic and real travelers with whose adventures and challenges our imagination is awakened, reading and almost devouring their stories, told by themselves or by their chroniclers.
are called adventurers, explorers, pilgrims, hustlers or globetrotters, all are marked by addiction to moving around the world in pursuit of experiences or knowledge, to go beyond the limits of what is known, or to get out of its oppressive reality, to free oneself. I have recorded the impact that I had years ago reading the intense biography of Richard Burton in search of the sources of the Nile, the stories in Africa of Mary Kingsley or those of Iraq Gertrude Bell.
Martín Casariego makes, with brief fragments, forceful but very agile portraits. He recommends reading them not continuously, but in moderate doses: surely each portrait will make us want to read the publications about each one or those that the travelers themselves have written.
On the pages of the book they peek out from traveling enthusiasts of antiquity , like Egeria , to explorers, pilgrims and navigators like Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Hernán Cortés, Domingo Badía, Richard Burton, Sven Hedin or Roald Amundsen , and unusual women, for whom travel has always been a double adventure (from Mary Wortley Montagu to Alexandra David Néel or Ella Maillart , with which this cast of extraordinary characters closes).
"Traveling is the best way to understand how wonderful the world is... And by doing it with these travelers we see how the human being shows sometimes that what seemed impossible before is possible ", tells us the author of the book, Martín Casariego, writer, film scriptwriter, chronicler and traveler, who has published an extensive literary work during his career and, in parallel, works as a travel chronicler and columnist for various media and publications.
Mr & Mrs Winston Churchill, T.E.Lawrence and Gertrude Bell in Egypt