Graham Reid: Postcards from elsewhere - odd destinations and unusual encounters

When Barry Manilow sang I Write the Songs it was probably Graham Reid who wrote the review. I'm only grateful that Manilow didn't write more.

But, happily, Reid has expanded his repertoire from music journalism to the travel writing which enlivens the pages of the Herald Travel section each week.

In this, his first book, Postcards from Elsewhere, Reid brings together some of his visits to unusual and offbeat places in North America, Asia, Europe and the South Pacific.

Our journeys with him through these stories bring us into contact with a diverse and occasionally odd group of people.

Nothing could be much odder than the visit to Graceland Too in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where we encounter the Elvis devotee who chose a dead King ahead of his wife.

But there's also a cockroach-ridden hotel in Taiwan, a haunting tale from the Old South, a taxi ride which cost 23 beers, a visit to the strange world of Salvadore Dali, an old soldier's memories of Korea and its war ... and much more.

Throughout the book, Reid's fairly limited travel budget ensures his destinations are mostly places an ordinary traveller could imagine going to as well, and his engaging and easy-going writing style makes these vicarious journeys seem especially real.

His marvellous ability with words not only delivers well-written passages that give the reader an enhanced sense of location, but also allows historical information to be easily digested, helping to keep a good pace to the book.

For me, this was most apparent in his visit to Cajun country. Reid's picture-in-words gives the Bayou the feel of an almost surreal, juxtaposed landscape, ecologically rich but set against a frame of broken tree trunks on an unnaturally motionless lake under a grey sky.

The lifeless stillness of air and water seem to close around you and as we pass just metres from a silent fisherman in a swamp-boat, your mind starts to nag you with, "What's the name of that film?"

In the short-story format, the diversity of the subject matter makes the book's structure an almost impossible task. As the book jumps continents it creates a break to the flow, with hindsight something a break from reading would probably have fixed.

The foreword suggests there is a logic to the order of stories but, for me, the oceans were too big a jump (perhaps with added material we could have had three more geographically coherent books and four times the pleasure).

With the exception of his description of an encounter with some pumpkin-flavoured candy, the book is refreshingly light on sarcasm and, unlike the Bill Bryson-style, leaves his subjects largely intact, allowing readers to bring their own judgments.

My conclusion is, read Reid.

* Random House ($29.95)
* Jane Daniels is an experienced traveller and a voracious reader of travel books.