The representative travel essay writer in Korea, Fanta, Jeon Myung Yun, finally has announced the stories he could not share in his guide book. This book tells us that traveling is not a prepared plastic farming house for pleasure only. Rather, this book offers the next stage of fantasy what readers have wanted to see and hear during the journey.
Fanta, who left for India with broken heart after the end of love relationship 20 years ago, learned only one lesson during his journey all over the world. What he realized is that being with someone else can only work when we know and understand our partner has walked through the different history from us. Travel only aiming at personal experience or just seeing beautiful sceneries will never show us the actual life of people living there. New things are revealed only when we meet actual people and try to research the history of that land. Therefore, ‘Traveling without Fantasy’ opens a door for readers to a new journey beyond fantasy.
In this book, the writer visits many places, including India, where people strongly believed that India would never change even 100 decades later, Macau where people built the city of Casino on the ocean, Okinawa where no one believes the myth of long-lived town any more, and Hong Kong where people fight for themselves to maintain freedom against the oppressive government. The writer, Fanta, comes back to his daily life after wandering various places and experiencing the current social issues in Asia. He says, “The life of journey is the life of coming back to ordinary life after traveling” His journey only becomes real under this philosophy.
