I'm still not finished, but I'm over 90%! One thing I've been dying to say since I started, and I don't know why I waited so long, is how ironic it is to have a book entitled Journey without Maps that begins with a map of the journey.
Now that that's off my chest, I can go on living.
I am enjoying the book, but it's not quite the book I was expecting from the sample I'd read. I wish he'd been less stolidly phlegmatic about it all. It is a grand adventure written about as if he were describing a walk down the lane. I suppose that's very British of him, but personally I think he goes above and beyond almost to the point of absurdity, treating the whole trip as approaching blasé.
Perhaps part of it has to do with the feeling that he seems to treat the trip as a duty or labour to be got through. I felt no sense of happiness, joy, wonder, amazement or anything really. The closest I think was the night in which there was a large moon and I think there'd been a dance or some communal get-together that night, and he speaks of how the moment of that night's atmosphere with the moonlight shining down was something that couldn't be experienced in England, or something like that.
Honestly, it seems like he didn't enjoy much of the trip. He explains why well, but I also think that made it less enjoyable as a reader, as instead of making the trip entertaining despite the bad or stressful things that happened, he drags us into the dullness of the problems. I don't need to be worrying about how many hampers of rice they'll be getting at each village and for what price and how hungry (or starving even) that will leave the men helping him on the way. I would like to know about these aspects of the trip, but he plops them down on the page so unemotionally and continuously.
It's also unfortunate he chose to use words like 'picaninny', and so often.
Still, it is amazing to think that he - and his cousin! - would embark on such difficult and dangerous trip as this that is so so far off the beaten path that in some of the villages they were the first white people the villagers had ever seen.