Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics

Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics

by Alexander Frater

Picador $120

Alexander Frater was born at Port Vila, capital of the South Pacific condominium of the New Hebrides, an uneasy meeting point of Anglophone and Francophone culture. It's in Port Vila that Frater, a New York Times reviewer and former chief travel correspondent for The Observer, begins Tales from the Torrid Zone. Girdling the Earth between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, it's the humid home to 1.7 billion people of 88 nations - 40 visited by the author - across the Pacific Ocean, Central America and the Caribbean, much of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia. Life in the tropics isn't easy, and part of Frater's story is a homage to his British parents: a father who feared his heart would stop in a cold climate; a mother who wished only to escape the torpor. Air-conditioning and antibiotics have changed everything. Frater has said that the reasons for making a journey often take precedence over the journey itself, and the best traveller's tales are really voyages into the mind of the author. This book is both.