Backpacked - Catherine Ryan Howard

    2011; 278 pages.  Full Title: Backpacked: A Reluctant Trip Across Central America.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Travel; Central America; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

 

    Backpacking.  An alternative way to visit get the “real feel” of an area you’re visiting for the first time.

 

    Throw everything you need into a giant fabric pack that's made to be carried around on your back.  And not some pansy-wansy Boy Scout-sized knapsack.  It has to hold everything you’d normally stow in one or more suitcases, because you’ll be dispensing with that amenity.

 

    This isn't the same as "roughing it".  You don't have to sleep on the ground out in the forest or cook your own meals over a rustic campfire.  Youth hostels, inns, and hotels are all acceptable, as are cafés, restaurants, and even fast-food joints, depending on your budget.  You can even party-hearty and partake of alcoholic beverages, all in the name of socializing with the locals.  Doesn’t this all sound like a heckuva lot of fun?

 

    Nope, not to me.  But I’d love to read a book about someone else who’s done it.

 

What’s To Like...

    Backpacked chronicles Catherine Ryan Howard’s 2008 travels throughout Central America in 2008 with her friend Sheelagh.  By her count, over a nine-week period they visited five countries, saw twenty-two different places, stayed in seventeen different rooms, taken ten different modes of transport, dipped their toes in four different bodies of water, and all without wearing a scrap of make-up.

 

    Both the author and Sheelagh are Irish, hence the book is written in English, not American.  So temperatures are given in degrees Centigrade, speeds are in kilometres-per-hour, at times you can’t be arsed, and if you come down with diarrhoea, you'll be forced to use the loo.

 

    Backpacked is a travelogue, so it's written in the first-person point-of-view of the author.  The 278 pages are divided into seventeen chapters (plus a prologue and an epilogue), all of similar length, and further grouped into five sections which correspond to the Central American nations the two wayfarers visit: Guatemala (chs. 1-9), Honduras (chs. 10-13), Nicaragua (chs. 14-15), Costa Rica (ch. 16), and Panama (ch. 17).

 

    I liked the “balance” between the adventures and misadventures that Catherine Ryan Howard experiences.  Some of the people she crosses paths with are obnoxious, others are a treat to meet.  Some situations she finds herself in are downright dangerous, others induce complete relaxation.  Some of the places where she stays are ratty, others are picturesque.  Sometimes there’s a cool breeze, other times the weather is unbearably hot and humid.

 

    The author’s opinion about outdoor activity matches up closely with my own (see the first excerpt below), so does the fact that she’s both a bookaholic and an introvert.  It was fun to learn about chicken buses (see the second excerpt below) and tuk-tuks, and I’d really love to be able to see the white haze of the Milky Way at least once while stargazing.  I’d never heard of the word “frienaissance” and didn’t have a clue who Liz Lemon was, so had to look up both of those terms.

 

    The book closes with a neat Epilogue, detailing how this trip led to a career turn in Catherine Ryan Howard’s life, and where Sheelagh ended up the following year.  If you’ve ever had any aspirations to be a self-published indie author (full disclosure: I don’t), you'll probably find the epilogue to be motivational.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.0/5 based on 258 ratings and 247 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.68/5 based on 774 ratings and 87 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    I hate anything that involves jumping, diving, falling, climbing or the need for a life jacket, and I only run if it’s away.  The sum total of my environmental efforts is watching An Inconvenient Truth – on board a less than half-empty 747 somewhere over the Atlantic, I kid you not.  I think being stoned all the time makes you… well, stoned all the time, or looking like a glassy-eyed, giggling idiot to me.  I don’t much like random strangers, which is to say that I’m not convinced that befriending the drunken guy in the corner and letting him talk to me for an hour about how we should all “believe in the trees” is the best possible use of my time.  (loc. 222)

 

    A chicken bus is, typically, a former US school bus – if you’re not American, those are the yellow buses you see in movies and on TV – that has been aesthetically reinvigorated with a colourful, occasionally psychedelic paint job and then released into the closest thing the country has to a public transport system.  Although they’ll deliver you to your destination for practically nothing - $1 or less – you’ll probably spend your journey with your face in someone else’s armpit and a chicken on your lap.  (loc. 2191)

 

Kindle Details…

    Alas, Backpacked is no longer available for the Kindle, which is also true of the author's other non-fiction books.  An Amazon reviewer in December 2017 also noted this, so I gather it is not a recent development.  Catherine Ryan Howard does offer five e-novels at Amazon, for the very reasonable cost of $0.99 apiece.  They appear to be mostly in the suspense-thriller genre.  You can pick up the paperback version of Backpacked at Amazon for a whopping $303.68 (*).  I assume that’s an entrepreneurial way of saying the book’s out-of-print.

 

    (*): Update: between writing that section and posting this review, the price for the paperback has dropped to $19.99.  Apparently, whoever’s been holding on to two copies of the paperback has decided to get real.

 

You can’t win an argument against an idiot because they don’t have to stick to the facts and you do.  (loc. 2977)

    I couldn't find much to quibble about in Backpacked.  It’s an incredibly “clean” book; I counted just eleven cusswords in the whole book.  Catherine and Sheelagh occasionally partake of a glass of wine or other alcohol, and they both smoke Marlboro Lights, but I don’t think little Tommy and Suzie are going to take up take up either vice due to reading this book.

 

    There is the usual amount of “spellchecker errors” found in self-published books.  Typos like peaked/peeked, Columbian/Colombian, wonder/wander, and two that made me chuckle: inequity/iniquity and tinkle/tinker.

 

    That’s about it for the nitpicking.  Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Backpacked, particularly since the previous travelogue I read was annoyingly negative (that review is here).  I can’t say this book made me want to go out and buy my own backpack, but I was left wondering whether there are any cruises around Central American available.  Maybe down the Caribbean side, through the Panama Canal, and up the Pacific side.  That would be awesome.

 

    8 Stars.  It's not for me to tell any author how to market their books, but methinks it's time to offer this book, and its “prequel”, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, in e-book format.