The Year of Doing Nothing: Reflections from an overland trip from Hong Kong to Patagonia

by Pritesh Modi

Following years spent working in Hong Kong, the writer gives away all his belongings and sets about on a series of overland journeys - mostly train, bus and boat rides - across Asia, Europe and down the Americas. The intention was to travel slowly, avoid flying where possible - and to eventually reach land's end, in Ushuaia, located at the southernmost tip of Argentina. The year-long journey takes him to more than thirty countries, across 60,000 km; a distance equivalent to circumventing the globe one and a half times. This part travelogue, part collection of essays, is a reflection of the places, the lessons, the foods, the stories, and most of all, the people he encounters along the way. From delving into the economics of free walking tours, to receiving a marriage proposal on the Trans-Siberian Railways, to his attempts at tracking down the "world's poorest president", and many other chance encounters, he comes to realize that "the year of doing nothing" was anything but that.

250 pages, Paperback

Published October 22, 2020

Reviews

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Brief at least

One the plus side it's a quick read with some nuggets of interesting information and ideas. On the minus side those nuggets must be extracted from a series of stream of conscious 'essays' (short snippets typically a page or two in length). Many of the essays are bland and the insights facile.

It's also full of spelling and grammar errors and awkward sentences. Plus the author gives off creepy vibes in his interactions with women throughout the book.

[Melo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the idea of the book, a bunch of essays based on the author's travels through the world, mostly by trains and buses.

Sadly, the book is littered with typos, odd sentences, words printed twice, artefacts from editing, etc. I might have gotten an early copy and it could be better now, it's an Amazon print-on-demand, so I assume one could fix the typos. My copy was from a second-hand store, so no clue if it was an early version or not.

The essays are fine, some are interesting, and some are not. Often I felt like the interesting essays could have gone a lot longer, but stopped rather suddenly which left a really bad feeling while reading.
The structure was also rather sporadic. The essays are lumped together in rough categories (People, Food, Places, and so on), but in those categories, there were always jumps between places which felt odd. For me, mixing the categories and writing it in a "chronological" order might have worked better.

I still give it two stars because I read the whole book and it made me want to travel. But it was mostly the lack of proofreading that killed the joy for me.