Nicholas Crane

This is the straightforward telling of an outrageous expedition. Two British cousins in their early 30s ride their bicycles from Bangladesh to Urumqi in 50 days, from the ocean to the place on earth furthest from any ocean. They go through Kathmandu, Lhasa, and Golmud to get to Urumqi.

The really outrageous thing, they carry no food, no tents, very limited water, just one set of clothes... at least they had sleeping bags! They just rely on the people they encounter along the way for food and water and places to sleep. They brought enough money to pay folks for the accommodations at least. Traveling with such a small amount of gear, they could use lightweight racing bikes. These were superlative athletes too. They were constantly at their limits... not just physical limits, but psychological. They spoke essentially no Chinese and had very limited information about their route. The road would switch from tarmac to gravel and back, according to no discernable pattern. They had maps, but whether a town on the map actually existed anymore was uncertain.

I followed their route on Google maps quite successfully. I didn't find every town mentioned but almost all of them. That map search I think helped keep me engaged. The book does have rough maps too.

I keep mulling over this approach of just counting on people to help. Much of the time they were eating and sleeping at commercial establishments, so that is straightforward. But in remote country they'd stop at any hut or tent to ask for food and shelter, or flag down trucks to get water. Probably Wyoming Utah Nevada is not quite as large an empty expanse as western China, but it's plenty of empty space all the same. I can't really imagine knocking on people's doors at random, outside of an emergency. Is that just my own limitation, or are people in the remote Western USA less generous... or certainly a foreign visitor can expect a different sort of hospitality. Would a Chinese cyclist be treated kindly on some remote road in Wyoming? The expectation of a British tourist to be treated hospitably in remote China... is that some kind of colonialist attitude?

Anyway, if you like tales of rotten roads, headwinds, rain squalls, etc. - this is certainly an expedition of an extreme sort!… (more)

From Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake to lesser-known scientific explorers and even an unknown mariner, a batch of new nonfiction works share previously overlooked stories set during the age of discovery. These titles expand our thinking about the people and missions that jumpstarted maritime travel and commerce.
Latitude: The True Story of the World’s First Scientific Expedition
Nicholas Crane, Oct 2021, Pegasus Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
Themes: World history, Maritime history, Expeditions, Age of Discovery

LATITUDE is a fast-paced nonfiction narrative tracing the adventures of a dozen eighteenth-century European scientists who made important discoveries about global navigation and other amazing achievements.
Take-aways: STEM educators will find this true story of scientific discovery to be an engaging way to teach youth about perseverance and the quest for knowledge.… (more)

"Latitude: The Astonishing Adventure That Shaped the World" by Nicholas Crane is a well-researched account of an expedition that calculated whether or not the Earth is spherical or oblong.

The book tried, but failed, to show the European adventurers who traveled to South America as comically inept. The failure was due to the fact that the scientists were given little exposition and few character traits, thereby causing tremendous confusion when their names were brought up again and again. The excitement of the book came from the conflicts between these scientists, all of whom we are told have giant egos. Their egotism is only shown in their professional conflicts.

Throughout the book, the adventuring scientists faced the natural dilemmas of any explorer - mosquitos, unbearable cold, unbearable heat - that occasionally sidetrack them, but nothing that is near fatal enough to possibly doom the expedition.

"Latitude" ended up being a bore for me because I found the events circular and the biographies of the characters one-dimensional. I was hoping for something more disastrous or incompetent, but it seemed to be just a regular expedition with a few conflicts of little significance.… (more)