The Captive Reader

I am always ready for a tale of travel adventures, especially after two years without any of my own.  When I stumbled across Our Trip Around the World by Renate Belczyk from the small publisher Rocky Mountain Books I wasn’t sure what I was picking up but it turned out to be the greatest journey I’ve come across in some time.

In 1955, Renate and Sigrid, young women in their early twenties, left their home in Germany and spent the next three years travelling the world as true adventurers.  They learned to rock climb in Mexico; hiked, canoed and skied in Canada; took up the suggestion from Japanese sailors that they visit their country, where they were gifted scooters and treated as minor celebrities; visited the Himalayas; explored India; saw the pyramids of Egypt; fell in love with Turkey; toured the Greek islands; and returned home – finally – via Yugoslavia and Austria.

The kindness and hospitality Renate and Sigrid encountered are unimaginable now in the age of mass tourism but enviable.  I think all travellers (especially those who think of themselves as “travellers” and would shudder to be called “tourists”) are looking for these personal encounters, with people who may giggle or stare at you but are still happy to give you a meal or a place to stay, who enjoy the novelty of having a stranger about as much as the stranger enjoys the novelty of being there.  This is harder and harder to find in the world.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the book is how unexpectedly active Renate and Sigrid’s travels were.  When I think of young women travelling, the 1920s adventures chronicled in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay come to mind – high spirited but ladylike travellers, with trunks and hats and an outfit for every occasion.  There were certainly still many travelling like that in the 1950s, but not Renate and Sigrid whose lives seem dominated by outdoor sports and rugged endeavours.  I can’t imagine their proper counterparts embracing new cultures and languages with the same enthusiasm, nor being as happy to work hard to afford their fun.  It’s refreshing to have this perspective and far more relatable than ones I’ve come across before.

With any book about female travel, I do wonder about safety issues.  I think their novelty factor afforded them some protection (as, I’d assume, did their white skin) from violence and harassment, but not entirely.  They camped for much of their journey and there were a few instances of people trying to get in – memorably, when one hand slipped through into the tent Renate bit it.  The hand – and its owner – quickly retreated.

The book is illustrated with photographs, which makes everything wonderfully real, but even without them this is one journey that is unforgettable.