Books Written by Anton Bantock
Take a look at the books that Anton has written about his travel adventures. The titles are published by The Withywood University Press. Please click here if you want to find out more about our publishers.
A4 size booklets from his travel letters and sketch books
£2 collected: £2.50 posted UK: £3.50 posted overseas
Please email the University if you would like to purchase any of these fascinating tales.
Journey up the Nile (Summer 1977)
Quite
definitely NOT the 4-star Thomas Cook job with air conditioning and cultural
tours – this was to experience how the natives travel this route in an
overcrowded Kitchener-vintage (c.1898!) paddle steamer from the Aswan Dam to
Wadi Haifa, and the other parts by train and Land Rover, with the usual quota of
delays, breakdowns in the Nubian Desert, at close quarters with local people,
livestock, rats, unimaginable dirt and discomfort, painfully observed; plus
hilarious encounters with other travellers. Certainly the most masochistic and
harrowing experience of my life………… but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
Trans-Siberian : Across Russia by Train
Several
journeys on the Trans-Siberian Railway – to Japan and back in 1970, in the days
of Soviet austerity and surveillance, and in the more liberal period of
Gorbachev’s ‘Perestroika’ in 1987. The cracks in the Soviet Empire already very
apparent and the demise predicted. Encounters with Soviet personnel, fellow
travellers - Russians and others - unacquainted with the Russian phenomenon –
observed with amusement and not a little sadness.
A Japanese Wedding (1994)
Telling
how British guests (my brother-in-law, two nephews and I) survived the quaint,
cramped and often very demanding etiquette of the Japanese people and their way
of doing things. Visually medieval, colourful, baffling; and banal, as a
consequence of trying to graft onto the beautiful, simple, spiritual Shinto
ceremony all the ridiculous trapping of a Western-style celebrity wedding. And
the guests accompany the young couple on their honeymoon tour – to Kyoto (1000
temples) and Jufuin with nude mixed-gender bathing in hot springs. This is not
fiction – it is fact.
The Boy with the Bear (Russia 2000)
A
tour of the former Soviet territories, beginning with Estonia, going on to St
Petersburg, Moscow, Novosobirsk and Akademgorodok in Siberia. The trials and
strivings of these long-suffering people observed at close quarters in their
homes and the often absurd consequences of putting back the clock 70 years to
the pre-Bolshevik era of the Petit Bourgeoisie and exposing the public to the
grosser aspects of Western commercialism. The return journey through Belorus – a
sharp reminder that Stalinism is not dead.
Overland to Calcutta 1966
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For £44 I run the gauntlet through more than a dozen countries; travelling
mostly by night by any form of transport available and sightseeing by day. The
middle bit – four days through the wastes of Baluchistan, sleeping in the desert
(snakes and scorpions) was an epic of endurance and the descent into the great
plains and rivers of North India, an odyssey of sublime proportions. When I got
to the Taj Mahal I crumpled and fell asleep on a foetid shelf.