Book review: One for the road by Tony Horwitz

This is another Australian travel book written by an American. Compared to Bryson's Sunburned country, this one has a more down-to-earth flavor, mostly because the author hitchhiked through the country and recorded his experience in the book.

It is not surprising that the unknown world such as the vast emptiness of Australia always allure people into an adventure . But not everybody had the courage to choose one of the most difficult way to travel, hitchhiking. I am not only talking about physical challenges a hitchhiker has to prepare himself for, e.g. when you stuck in middle of nowhere in a 40C day, and the only choice is to hike to the next shade (Horwitz had plenty of those episodes). The emotional part is more of a drain in my opinion. Let's hear what the author said (p49),

"Hitchhiking is strange that way--at once the loneliest and most social of occupations. One moment you're stranded by the highway, as rootless as a piece of driftwood. The next moment you're thrust into someone else's life. Where the driver goes, you will follow..."

Not sure if I can handle such an occupation myself, probably not. Horwitz had some advantages however. He had hitchhiked before in the US and perhaps more importantly, he was a journalist, whose job description is to "thrust into someone else's life" I suppose.

Still hitchhikers do at least one thing journalists don't normally do. Not only they thrust into others' life, they also stuck there for a while. Normally one can jump off at the next traffic light if he doesn't like the driver much. But in the outback of Australia, there is no traffic light; in fact, there is no traffic a lot of the times. So for Horwitz often there was no other choices than stuck with some most peculiar souls on earth.

These peculiar encounters gave this journalist a lot to write about. He is a great storyteller and he never failed to find the funny side of the most bizarre episodes. Similar to Bryson, he also delivered a sense of appreciation. He observed and tried to be part of the culture; he talked and most often drank with people and became friends with them the next morning (though hangovered).

Drinking was one major theme of the book that came back page after page. Just when you think "this is absurd--they could not drink like this..." Some more outrageous stories were waiting for you several pages away. According to Horwitz, drink not only became a unit of measurement in the outback ( a ten-pub town and the next town is six-packs away), it was also a hobby people had, which means they drink whenever and wherever. Drinking while driving seemed to a norm out there.

Government did try to put a leash on this lavish drinking culture. In one three-pub town the regulation said a pub could only open five hours on Sunday, for instance. But then we have another example of "Unintended consequences". The three pubs reached an agreement and offered its residence a 15 hours pub crawling opportunity every Sunday. In the pub that last opened, only women were dancing as Horwitz found out. Why? Because no man could stand still at that point!

(If half is true about Australians' passion towards drinking, I finally started to understand my PHD supervisor's concern when I told him I was moving here--"How could you survive?! You don't drink!")

The other major theme of the book was self-finding. As a Jewish Horwitz naturally has normadic genes that justify his desire for "boyish adventures" once in a while. But the questions of "where to and what's for" were something he kept on asking himself throughout his trip and the book. He seemed to find the answer in a remote town in West Australia in the last several pages of the book, when he was disparate to find a Jewsih family to spend the Passover night. Only until that point he realized after all these meatpies, beers and sunburns, what matters most is a place called home.

But home doesn't necessarily means a physical address, as the lucky author realized when he was sharing kosher wine with the only Jewish family at the Passover dinner table. People are mobile and so is our home and culture. But the only thing that is not changed so much is our desire to be part of our culture. This revelation put a satisfying period to Horwitz's career as a hitchhiker and also for this 200+ pages of well-written adventure.