The Art of Travel Writing

When I was still in the university, I was inspired by the travel books of Jack Kerouac. I couldn’t afford to travel then. So my escape became reading Kerouac and learning about the experiments of the beatnik generation. I couldn’t relate to these adventures fully but the free flow stream of consciousness writing exploring existentialism stirred me. How can I forget the adventures of Kerouac and Neal Cassady encapsulated in the classics On the Road and Dharma Bums! I wished to travel like Kerouac and the bunch of hippies who tagged along with him.

Not that I didn’t explore travel writing beyond Kerouac’s. I absorbed Andrew Solomon’s essays in Far and Away where he reported from the seven continents that he was posted in. I read Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and wrote this book about ‘travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, breaching life, death, motion and migration’. However, no other travel book came close to exciting me to the same heights that Kerouac writing did.

Not till now, that is. 

I just finished reading Harley Rustad’s account of disappearance of Justin Alexander Shetler in the Parvati Valley in Himalayas. Many would count this book — Lost in the Valley of Death, called so for at least two dozen foreign tourists have lost their lives in the remote Parvati Valley — under narrative non-fiction, but to me it stood out as a travel book. For yes, it was a book that followed Shetler’s life as he travelled all across the globe searching for something. What that something was, could not be pinpointed. Shetler, who preferred to go with only Justin Alexander as his name, was an inveterate traveller and a seeker. He quit his tech job and set out on a global journey which took him to South America and many Asian countries before he finally embarked on a Himalayan trek in 2016. In this journey, he made his way to the Parvati Valley where he planned to spend time in wilderness and live in the caves (Shetler was a trained wilderness expert). 

Rustad crafts the narrative masterfully, piecing it together with interviews with people who met Shelter and Shelter’s Instagram footprints that he updated till the very end. Based on these pieces,  Rustad postulates that Shelter sought peace, that his search for spiritual enlightenment brought him to a country other than his own, where he trekked in the remote valleys, meditated inside caves, and smoked hashish to set off on his spiritual journey. In this search, Shetler sought guidance. That perhaps turned out to be his biggest undoing. Shetler came across a sadhu and spent weeks under his tutelage. It was this sadhu who took him to the Parvati Valley from where Shetler never returned. His remains were not found, except for a flute that he carried everywhere with him. 

This book remained with me long after I had finished reading it. It stood out for it reminded me of Kerouac and the beatniks that he documented so well. Shetler would have easily found himself at home in that company. Who knows, but perhaps Kerouac’s writing inspired Shetler to leave everything aside, buy a motorcycle (a Royal Enfield) and travel. 

In Shetler, I found a little of myself, for had I not dreamt of travelling to the now notorious village of Malana and stay there for as long as I could. Had I not once thought of leaving the corporate world aside, and travel across. I even took a step in the direction when I remained on the road for month, travelling with as little money as possible and spending nights in the shelters that strangers offered. Something pulled me back though. I wasn’t perhaps strong enough to survive on the road for so long myself. The comforts of a settled life and money that a steady job guarantees — though I feel ashamed to admit it — brought me back from the wilderness to the concrete jungles of Delhi. But Shetler had continued. 

I finished the book with a hint of happiness nestled inside sadness that came with learning about Shetler’s story. Here was a young man, on a spiritual quest, who lost himself to the dangers and secrets of Himalayas. It could have been my story fifteen years back. At the same time, I was kept captivated and thrilled by the book. It served as a reminder that travel writing is not dead. Documenting travel need not be a boring account of bromide journeys. Rather, in a world dominated with short form bits captured on Instagram, a good story can still be told. 

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