The Best American Travel Writing 2000

Each month we recommend one book/audio cd that we’ve had fun reading or listening to. This month it’s The Best American Travel Writing 2000, edited by Bill Bryson, the guy that wrote A Walk in the Woods.

Our “Trailer Truck” Rating System

🚛 🚛 🚛 🚛 (4 Trailer Trucks)

Why’d we love it?

Because it included a nonfiction piece titled “The World’s Toughest Trucker” by Tom Clynes, a photojournalist who travels the world covering the adventurous sides of science, the environment, and education for publications such as National Geographic, Nature, The New York Times, and Popular Science.

It’s a story about a 1,500-mile round trip—not a single foot on paved roads—that takes fuel truck driver Garry White through Australia’s most inaccessible wilderness. He has to plow through jungle rivers, chain-saw through downed trees, and shovel his way out of truck-gobbling mud holes. Every time he stops to change a flat tire or replace an axle, he’s bait for leeches, wild boars, taipans and giant crocs.

Tom Clynes has a Blog that we recommend you checking out and it even includes this story along with pictures of the trip.

Is that it?

No. This collection of tales from The Best American Travel Writing 2000 includes other true stories like picking up hitchhikers in Cuba, which supposedly is a custom. Or the story of spending the night camping out in Central Park with raccoons or being trapped on a boat in the Congo for days and then meeting a man named God.