Strange facts from author John Oldale

Why did you write the book?

I guess the chief reason was a wish to do something constructive with all the experiences, conversations and opportunities for contemplation that I have been privileged enough to enjoy while travelling over the last 20 years or so.

There are only so many holiday snaps you can bore people with, and the world already has enough blogs from the road covering – with honourable exceptions – a fairly restricted subset of places and activities. In any event, as time has gone by, I have become less interested in seeing the sorts of specific sights that get listed in guidebooks and more interested in trying to soak up the mood and feel of the cultures that host them.

I’m sure I’m not alone in frequently finding the other passengers on the train to the temple more interesting than the temple itself.

How did you research the book? On the internet? In a library? Or on the road?

I didn’t set foot in a library. I do, however, have a fairly extensive set of reference books at home, which were helpful for fact-checking and sometimes for background information. But even these I consulted fairly sparingly – when I started writing, I took out an online subscription to the Encyclopaedia Britannica but, in truth, even a hefty tome such as that usually didn’t go into the level of detail I needed. The hard facts in the book were largely obtained online.

Used cautiously, Wikipedia is a matchless resource and I would typically consult it while writing up most of the individual pieces. Wherever possible, I would then go beyond Wikipedia to more specialised sources – often material published in local languages or original academic papers (the abstracts are almost free, even if the papers themselves often require subscriptions). While relatively little in the book comes directly from my travelling, the experiences I’ve had were absolutely crucial in shaping how I wrote up many of the facts. The book would have been very different if it had been a purely desk project.